XVIII.

It was the next day, I think, that I met Mowbray Langdon and his brother Tom in the entrance to the Textile Building. Mowbray was back only a week from his summer abroad; but Tom I had seen and nodded to every day, often several times in the same day, as he went to and fro about his "respectable" dirty work for the Roebuck-Langdon clique. He was one of their most frequently used stool-pigeon directors in banks and insurance companies whose funds they staked in their big gambling operations, they taking almost all the profits, and the depositors and policy holders taking almost all the risk. It had never once occurred to me to have any feeling of any kind about Tom, or in any way to take him into my calculations as to Anita. He was, to my eyes, too obviously a pale understudy of his powerful and fascinating brother. Whenever I thought of him as the man Anita fancied she loved, I put it aside instantly. "The kind of man a woman _really_ cares for," I would say to myself, "is the measure of her true self. But not the kind of man she _imagines_ she cares for."

Tom went on; Mowbray stopped. We shook hands, and exchanged commonplaces in the friendliest way--I was harboring no resentment against him, and I wished him to realize that his assault had bothered me no more than the buzzing and battering of a summer fly. "I've been trying to get in to see you," said he. "I wanted to explain about that unfortunate Textile deal."

This, when the assault on me had burst out with fresh energy the day after he landed from Europe! I could scarcely believe that his vanity, his confidence in his own skill at underground work, could so delude him. "Don't bother," said I. "All that's ancient history."

But he had thought out some lies he regarded as particularly creditable to his ingenuity; he was not to be deprived of the pleasure of telling them. So I was compelled to listen; and, being in an indulgent mood, I did not spoil his pleasure by letting him see or suspect my unbelief. If he could have looked into my mind, as I stood there in an attitude of patient attention, I think even his self-complacence would have been put out of countenance. You may admire the exploits of a "gentleman" cracksman or pickpocket, if you hear or read them with only their ingenuity put before you. But _see_ a "gentleman" liar or thief at his sneaking, cowardly work, and admiration is impossible. As Langdon lied on, as I studied his cheap, vulgar exhibition of himself, he all unconscious, I thought: "Beneath that very thin surface of yours, you're a poor cowardly creature--you and all your fellow bandits. No; bandit is too grand a word to apply to this game of 'high finance.' It's really on the level with the game of the fellow that waits for a dark night, slips into the barnyard, poisons the watch dog, bores an auger hole in the granary, and takes to his heels at the first suspicious sound."

With his first full stop, I said: "I understand perfectly, Langdon. But I haven't the slightest interest in crooked enterprises now. I'm clear out of all you fellows' stocks. I've reinvested my property so that not even a panic would trouble me."

"That's good," he drawled. I saw he did not believe me--which was natural, as he thought I was laboring in heavy weather, with a bad cargo of coal stocks and contracts. "Come to lunch with me. I've got some interesting things to tell you about my trip."

A few months before, I should have accepted with alacrity. But I had lost interest in him. He had not changed; if anything, he was more dazzling than ever in the ways that had once dazzled me. It was I that had changed--my ideals, my point of view. I had no desire to feed my new-sprung contempt by watching him pump in vain for information to be used in his secret campaign against me. "No, thanks. Another day," I replied, and left him with a curt nod. I noted that he had failed to speak of my marriage, though he had not seen me since. "A sore subject with all the Langdons," thought I. "It must be very sore, indeed, to make a man who is all manners neglect them."

My whole life had been a series of transformations so continuous that I had noted little about my advance, beyond its direction--like a man hurrying up a steep that keeps him bent, eyes down. But, as I turned away from Langdon, I caught myself in the very act of transformation. No doubt, the new view had long been there, its horizon expanding with every step of my ascent; but not until that talk with him did I see it. I looked about me in Wall Street; in my mind's eye I saw the great rascals of "high finance," their respectability stripped from them, saw them gathering in the spoils which their cleverly trained agents, commercial and political and legal, filched with light fingers from the pockets of the crowd, saw the crowd looking up to these trainers and employers of pickpockets, hailing them "captains of industry"! They reaped only where and what others had sown; they touched industry only to plunder and to blight it; they organized it only that its profits might go to those who did not toil and who despised those who did. "Have I gone mad in the midst of sane men?" I asked myself. "Or have I been mad, and have I suddenly become sane in a lunatic world?"

I did not linger on that problem. For me action remained the essential of life, whether I was sane or insane. I resolved then and there to study out a new course. By toiling like a sailor at the pump of a sinking ship, I had taken advantage to the uttermost of the respite Galloway's help had given me. My property was no longer in more or less insecure speculative "securities," but was, as I had told Langdon, in forms that would withstand the worst shocks. The attacks of my enemies, directed partly at my fortune, or, rather, at the stocks in which they imagined it was still invested, and partly at my personal character, were doing me good instead of harm. Hatred always forgets that its venomous shafts, falling round its intended victim, spring up as legions of supporters for him. My business was growing rapidly; my daily letter to investors was read by hundreds of thousands where tens of thousands had read it before the Roebuck-Langdon clique began to make me famous by trying to make me infamous.

"I am strong and secure," said I to myself as I strode through the wonderful canyon of Broadway, whose walls are the mighty palaces of finance and commerce from which business men have been ousted by the cormorant "captains of industry." I must _use_ my strength. How could I better use it than by fluttering these vultures on their roosts, and perhaps bringing down a bird or two?

I decided, however, that it was better to wait until they had stopped rattling their beaks and claws on my shell in futile attack. "Meanwhile," I reasoned, "I can be getting good and ready."

TO BE CONTINUED.

A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM

By FRANCIS METCALFE

In the region of South Washington Square there are many ancient dwellings which have fallen into uses which would make their original owners, who were the solid men of old New York, turn over in their narrow vaults in Trinity churchyard if they could know of them. Alien peoples, swarthy of skin and picturesque of dress, occupy and surround them, and strange industries are carried on under the roofs which once sheltered the families of the dignified old Knickerbockers who formed the aristocracy of the city.

In many of these transformed residences of the wealthy, after climbing many flights of stairs, whose quaint old mahogany balustrades have been marred by generations of careless movers, one comes to apartments which are provided with skylights and northern windows, and these, being classified as studios, command relatively high rents, considering the lack of every modern convenience and comfort. They are occupied by the younger and unknown artists, who cannot afford the rents demanded in the more fashionable studio buildings, and the reek of the oil stove and odor of cooking, mingling with the smell of paint and turpentine, which pervades the hallways, indicate that they are used as living quarters and work rooms combined.

The whole quarter abounds in cheap restaurants, places where one may obtain a full course dinner, of sorts, and a small bottle of alleged claret included, for an absurdly small sum; but a carton of biscuits, a tin of sardines and a can of condensed milk are usually in evidence on the littered tables of the studios, and, together with the odor of stale coffee, bespeak an economy of diet which is incompatible with the good work which comes of the well-fed body.

It was in one of these small rooms, perched at the top of the tallest among the houses, that a girl lay on a couch, her face buried in her hands, as the early dusk of a winter's afternoon softened the tawdriness of the furnishings. A curtain of burlaps screened one corner, hiding the toilet arrangements, which would have suggested that the couch served as a bed by night; and the flowering plants at the window, the arrangement of artistic posters and sketches on the walls, and, above all, the neatness and orderliness of the room, proclaimed feminine occupancy.

Her attitude was that of dejection, and she had not waited to remove coat or hat before seeking consolation in the refuge of tears; but there was determination in her expression and in the set of her shoulders when she sat up and looked resentfully at the flat package lying on the table. The imprint of a well-known publishing house was on the wrapping paper, and in her hand was a letter from the same firm, thanking her for the privilege of examining the sketches and regretting that they were not fitted to their immediate needs. She lighted a gas jet and re-read the letter, trying to derive some comfort from the courtesy of the declination, but when she unwrapped the sketches, she was forced to acknowledge to herself that they did not seem so strong as when she hopefully submitted them a fortnight before.

These two weeks had been a time of anxiety for Elizabeth Thornton, for so much depended upon the sale of the sketches, the results of months of labor, that she had alternately built castles in the air and wondered what was to become of her, as her mood made her hopeful or despondent of their acceptance. She had sold some of her work during her three years of study in New York, but not enough to pay even her very modest living expenses, and these, together with the fees for tuition at the art school and the purchase of material, had diminished almost to the vanishing point the few hundreds of dollars which she possessed when she commenced her studies.

A knock on the door caused her to glance hastily around the room, to be sure that evidences of domestic occupancy were not scattered about, before opening it to the tall, good-looking young fellow who stood hat in hand, his fur-lined coat thrown open and an expectant smile on his face.

"I have climbed so many stairs that I am not sure whether I have reached heaven or the studio of Miss Elizabeth Thornton," he said, breathlessly, in a cheery voice; but the girl, whose face was in the shadow while his was in the light, extended her hand and greeted him warmly.

"Tom, you irreverent boy! Come inside this minute, before you scandalize my neighbors," she exclaimed. "And now that you are in, tell me how you found me out and how you happen to be in New York."

"In the first place, I am fortunate enough not to find you out, and, secondly, I don't happen to be in New York; I just live here, as I have done any time these past three years. But I didn't know that you did until I met old Oliver, who gave me your address. I didn't know whether it was your place of business or your dwelling; but I came on the chance of finding you."

"And I don't think you appreciate yet that it is both," she said, an amused expression on her face, as she saw him glance around the room.

"Do you really live here, too?" he asked. The evidence of the studio was there, but none of the delicate and dainty traces of a feminine bedchamber.

"Indeed I do, and when it comes 'by-low' time, there is a grand transformation scene," she answered, laughing; and, although he joined in her laughter, there was sadness in his heart as he realized the import of the meager accommodations.

"I don't see a kitchen, at any rate, so I suppose there is no reason why you can't come out to dinner with me this evening," he said.

"Nothing but your presence, which prevents me from changing my gown," she replied, doubtfully. "You can choose between walking the streets and sitting on the stairs outside while I get ready."

"Don't make it as long a proceeding as in the old days, then," he said, as he stood by the table and carelessly turned over the sketches, and she smiled a little bitterly as she promised to hurry, realizing how little she had to select from as compared to the days when the choice from many gowns demanded due consideration. A flood of recollections came to her as she made her hasty toilet, and she appreciated, from the cheer and life which Tom Livingston's brief presence had brought into the studio, how terribly lonely her life had been for the past few months. Before that there had been the companionship of her fellow students in the art school, many of the women struggling along like herself, living on the bare necessities of life and oftentimes knowing what it meant to lack for them, but stimulated and kept at their work by the hope of ultimate success in their painting.

The small glass told her that her face was still very attractive, although it had lost much of the girlish prettiness it possessed in the days when Tom had known and loved her; but then--thank Heaven!--she had never cared for such things, and all she wanted was success in her chosen profession, the one thing which she loved in life.

And Tom, on the other side of the door, was also thinking of her career and the visible results of her work since he had seen her; the small, cheap studio in the dilapidated old house and the lack of comfort in her mode of living, and he contrasted it with the home he had known her in and the things he could have surrounded her with, had she accepted his offer when the crash came which threw her on her own resources. She had elected to remain independent, to devote what little money had been saved from the wreck of her fortunes to pursuing her studies in painting; encouraged in her decision by the praise which her amateurish efforts had gained from sympathetic friends. But while the studies of the daughter of John Thornton, one of the most influential men of the city where they lived, might be praised by the good-natured reporters of the home papers at local exhibitions, the works of Elizabeth Thornton, of whose parentage and social position the critics neither knew nor cared, were judged on their merits when she asked that they be taken seriously, and they were found sadly wanting.

Tom could imagine the girl's latter history from what he knew of the artists' colony in New York; the years in the art school, where she had worked hard and no one had been sufficiently ill-natured or had cared enough for her to tell her to give it up, and then the misguided judgment which had led her to take a studio for herself. He had tactfully said nothing when he had looked over the sketches; but he knew that they were bad, and his sharp eyes had not missed the traces of tears on her face; so he easily made two, by the old process of putting one and one together, and formed a pretty accurate guess as to what had happened.

Elizabeth was all smiles when she joined him, and they went down the long stairs together. The dinner was a delight to her; the well-cooked and daintily served food, the pretty table appointments, and the music from the balcony, all seemed like a breath from the past--from the time before she became absorbed in what she called her "life work."

"It is so long since I have been in such a delightful place as this, with the prospect of such a dinner, that you must not expect me to talk," she said, when he had given the order, after due consultation with her over the menu. "But I am a good listener, and you can tell me about what you have been doing."

"It is neither a very long nor a very exciting narration," he replied, laughing. "You gave me such a very decided answer, three years ago, that I haven't had the courage to look at a woman since, and if you can't find a woman in three years of a man's life, it is safe to say that it has been uneventful." She looked at him apprehensively, for there was one topic which she had determined to avoid, and here he was rushing into it before the oysters were served.

"No, no. It isn't that which I wish to know about," she said, hastily. "But tell me what you have been doing; what you are doing now."

"This evening I am dining with some one whom I have thought of every day since I saw her last," he answered, gallantly. "During the day I spend most of my time in a disagreeable office, working for money which I do not need, because that seems to be the custom of American men. That has been my life for half of each of these three years; the alternate six months I have spent in Florence with my mother."

"I envy you the Florentine portion of the year," she said, looking at him a little wistfully. "Some day, when my ship comes in, I hope to spend a long time there."

"I go back in two months," he said, eagerly. "My mother would be delighted to see you, if you would come over with me."

"Ah, but my ship may be delayed longer than that and----"

"There is a ship always at your disposal, now as it was three years ago," he interrupted, but she made a gesture of protest.

"It is good to see you again, Tom; it is nice to be with you. Please don't make it necessary for me to send you away again. Let's just be friends, and let me feel that I have your sympathy and affection in the struggle I am having with my life work."

"You have both, always, little girl; but is it worth it, this 'life work'? Is it enough to repay you for sacrificing all that other women find good in life? I wish that you would tell me about your troubles in it; your struggles and disappointments and what you hope for." It was no easy recital which the girl entered upon, and her pride made her conceal a great deal; but from what Tom knew of her circumstances before she started in, and the conclusions he had drawn from what he had seen, he was able to read between the lines of her story.

"And so, you see, I am not able to do as good work as I should," she faltered over the coffee. "I am 'faking' it all, because I cannot afford to use models, and what talent I may have is in the line of portraiture. But sitters don't flock to South Washington Square, and it is hard to get a start."

"Have you ever done portraits?" he asked, anxious to find a way to help her.

"No--that is, no paying ones. I have painted only two, and, like the country storekeeper, taken my pay in kind; but they were good, Tom--really they were, and I feel that if I could get such work to do I could make a name for myself."

"Why not paint my portrait?" he asked, suddenly. "I have always longed to have my phiz, labeled 'Portrait of a Gent,' staring from the wall at an exhibition."

"I'm afraid it would be from near the skyline, if my signature were on it," she answered, laughing. "That is, if it were accepted at all; but you must understand, Tom, old boy, that I can't accept your offers of help, even under the thickest of veils."

"That is the beastly part of the conventions of this miserable world," he answered, irritably. "Here am I, strong, healthy and with more of its goods than I can use, and yet you can't accept from my surplus enough to tide you over a lean year or two, because Mrs. Grundy forbids."

"But she is a very real and very terrible person; even to bachelor maids, Tom. If, like a sensible boy, you had married a sensible girl, whom you could send to me for her portrait, it would be different, for you would receive full value, and at the same time assist a struggling young artist."

"By Jove, I have it!" he exploded. "I have not committed matrimony myself, but a lot of my friends have, and I am going to demand payment for all the teething rings, caudle cups and other baby truck I have been distributing, and make 'em all send their kids to you for their portraits."

"Oh, Tom, you are a dear, but remember the size of my studio, and let them come one at a time," she answered, laughing at his enthusiasm. "Remember that two babies would crowd it dreadfully, and I wouldn't know how to get on with even one."

"Never fear, you will pick that up fast enough, Betsy, and if you can deliver the goods, your fortune is made. What do you charge for the life-sized portrait of a baby?"

"Why, really, I haven't a fixed price," she answered, realizing that he was in earnest. "As I told you, I have painted but two portraits, and the payment for the last was the making of this gown. It was my dressmaker's picture." He looked her over critically.

"Well, it's mighty becoming. I suppose that is equivalent to about five hundred dollars, isn't it?"

"Oh, Tom! You are a greater baby than the sitters whom you propose to send to me," she exclaimed. "If I become famous, I may ask that much years and years from now."

"Young woman, you are to understand that you are 'personally conducted' in your new field, and I am your manager. It won't do to cheapen your work by putting a small price on it. Make 'em pay, and they will think that you are great."

"Not when they see my studio," she answered, but his enthusiasm was comforting to her.

The little studio was not satisfying to Elizabeth as she transformed it into a bedroom by the simple process of bringing the bedclothes out from their place of concealment and sliding back the curtain. The unaccustomed luxury of the dinner had awakened old memories of the comfort and daintiness which had been unknown to her in her later life, and the rejection of her sketches had shattered the dreams of acquiring them again, which had comforted her when she sent them out. And Tom, bowling up the avenue in a hansom, felt uncomfortable at the thought of her being in such a place alone and unprotected, for the dinner had awakened memories in his mind, too, and renewed the old longing for Elizabeth which he thought the years of separation had conquered.

"But she is not the kind of a woman to come to me because she has made a failure, and, if she were, she would not be worth the winning," he thought, bitterly, as he lighted his cigar. "A little more of the life she is leading now, a few more disappointments, and the woman that is in her, the part of herself which she has crushed back for the past three years, will be annihilated. I must find some way to rescue it, to rouse it, and when she has achieved, at least, a semblance of success, trust to my own good fortune to make her look at things as I want her to see them."

It was a new proposition to him, and he racked his brain to find a way out, and by the time he reached his club he was in a mood to resort to physical violence, if necessary, to make any one of his married friends promise to deliver up a child for portrait purposes. But the club was deserted, and he went to bed to spend a wakeful night in seeking a solution of his problem.

Elizabeth smiled grimly the next day as she was preparing her frugal luncheon. A bunch of violets, whose value represented a half month's rent of her tiny studio, was diffusing fragrance through it, and a basket of fruit, which would last a month, was on the table; but the necessaries were represented by a pot of tea, a package of biscuits and a small pat of butter. Even the last was an unwonted extravagance at midday, but, after the dinner of the night before, she could not descend too suddenly to dry biscuits, and, after all, Tom's confidence had given her more courage for the future. She had even tried to work over the rejected sketches with a certain degree of hopefulness, but her heart was not in it, and she was gazing at one of them disconsolately, when there was a sharp knock at the door, and Tom, disregarding all studio ethics, burst in before she could open it. He seized both of her hands and whirled her about the room, to the grave peril of her modest bric-a-brac, his face beaming and his eyes sparkling with pleasure.

"Betsy, things are coming your way; I've caught one for you," he almost shouted, and she implored him to be quiet and tell her what he meant.

"Why, a subject--a victim, or whatever you call people who have their portraits painted. No end of money and fame undying--but I haven't time to tell you about it all now. Just let me know when you can commence, and I will have her here."

"Are you in earnest, Tom?" she asked, incredulously; for the sudden realization of his prophecies of the night before seemed too good to be true.

"In earnest? Well, rather. Young woman, your foot is on the first rung of the ladder of fame, and the day is coming when I shall be proud to know you."

"But who is it?" she persisted.

"Her name wouldn't mean anything to you, and I haven't time to tell you the story, but I will take you out to dinner to-night and tell you all about it."

"But how old is she, Tom? I must know what to prepare for."

"I wasn't indiscreet enough to ask the lady's age, but I should say about four years. I can see that there is no chance of getting anything but questions out of you; but I will make the appointment for ten to-morrow morning, and call for you at six-thirty tonight for dinner. Please be ready, so that I will not have to camp on those confounded stairs."

Tom's story at dinner was as delightful as a fairy tale to her, and if the first one had been made pleasant by anticipation, the feast of realization transported her to the realm of air castles. The arrival of the Italian family which had come from Florence to settle in New York, bearing letters of introduction to Tom from his mother, just in time to fit into his plans to make her a painter of children, seemed a harbinger of good fortune. The father had been most enthusiastic when Tom mentioned the "rising young artist" to him, and was anxious that the sittings should commence immediately, before her time was all taken up.

"There is only one drawback, Betsy," said Tom, as he finished his story. "Little Carlotta speaks only Italian, so I will have to be there a lot to translate."

"But won't the mother, or some one, come with her?" she asked, in surprise.

"You would be no better off, for they can't any of 'em speak English. I have promised to bring her and fetch her away, anyway."

"Tom, I don't know how to thank you for what you are doing for me; but it is awful to be under such an obligation to anyone," she said, the tears coming to her eyes.

"If you think it's any hardship to ride around in a cab with the young lady, just wait until you see her. She is a raving, tearing beauty," he answered, laughing, but Elizabeth was none the less grateful.

Tom's enthusiastic description of the child was borne out by the facts, and it was a very beautiful and very dainty little lady whom he carried into the studio the next morning. She was typically Italian, and the dark hair, warm, brown skin and large, soft eyes, gave her almost an Oriental expression, in spite of the conventional frills and furbelows in which she was dressed.

"Here she is, Betsy," said Tom, gayly, as he sat down with the youngster on his lap. "Now tell me what you want her to do, and I will translate for you, for I must leave her with you while I go to the office." Elizabeth looked at the child, who was gravely inspecting the studio with wise-looking eyes.

"But, Tom, suppose she should cry or anything; what am I to do? She can't understand me, and I shouldn't know what to say, anyway."

"And this is what comes of being an independent woman," he said, looking at her in disapproval. "Well, you will have to take a chance, and get on the best you know how, but I shall have luncheon sent in here, and come back to eat it with you, for I can't trust the child's diet to a bachelor maid."

Carlotta was frightened when Tom left, and Elizabeth began, rather timidly, to comfort her; but she found it an easier task than she had imagined. The feeling of the warm young body against her breast, the sweet perfume of the child's hair and the caressing touch of the little hands as they crept about her neck, were grateful to the lonely artist, and somewhere in the womanhood within her, she found words which Carlotta could understand, although they belonged to no language known to grownups. After the first feeling of strangeness had worn off, the child was quite contented with her, and so comfortable and comforting in her arms that but little progress had been made with the portrait when a waiter brought in the luncheon which Tom had ordered from a neighboring restaurant. Tom came back to eat it with them, and he was entirely satisfied with the friendship which had sprung up between the woman and the child.

"I was asked to give you this; it seems that it is an Italian custom to pay part in advance," he said, handing her an envelope as he left her, and when she opened it she found a crisp and substantial bank note. He took the little girl home that night, and when he returned to take Elizabeth out to dinner, she was so elated that she seemed to be walking on air; but she insisted that they go to a little Italian restaurant, where she had been in the habit of dining.

"I was getting awfully tired of it, Tom, but Carlotta has given me a liking for everything Italian," she said, merrily, and Tom, in the happiness which the change in her brought to him, ate the indifferent food and drank the doubtful wine contentedly. A few days later he heard singing when he knocked on Elizabeth's door for luncheon, and recognized an old nursery rhyme, which he had not heard since his childhood, and when he came in he found her seated on the floor with Carlotta, in the midst of a collection of toys, which must have made a decided hole in her advance payment.

"Is this the way you attend to your 'life work,' young woman?" he asked, with mock severity, and she seemed a little shamefaced; but when the waiter brought the luncheon, he found all three of them on the floor, and Elizabeth not at all pleased with the fickle Carlotta's preference for the house which Tom had built with the blocks. But nothing could disturb Tom's good nature these days, for he realized that Elizabeth was growing fonder of the child each day, and with it all she seemed happier and more feminine. About a week after the sittings commenced, he noticed that her hair was arranged in the fluffy, loose way he had admired so much three years before, giving her face more of the girlish expression it had lost, and a bright ribbon at the throat relieved the somberness of her working gown.

"Why, Betsy, you are growing younger," he said, looking at her in admiration, and she blushed in confusion.

"You mean my hair and the ribbon," she replied, with a little trace of self-consciousness in her manner. "Well, you see, Carlotta is of a race which likes bright colors, so I thought it would please her."

"And incidentally you have given me great pleasure," he said, smiling at her, approvingly, and a song was in his heart as he went down the stairs.

Sunshine is not abundant in a New York winter, and none of it enters the northern windows of a studio; but Elizabeth's tiny apartment came to have an entirely different atmosphere while the child spent her days in it. The program remained the same as on the first day; but Elizabeth employed so much of her time in petting and playing with the child, that the portrait did not advance rapidly, although enough had been accomplished to show that it promised to be, by far, the best thing which she had ever done. The jolly luncheons were a joy to both of them, and Carlotta always gave a crow of delight, which Elizabeth's heart was beginning to echo, when Tom's merry whistle heralded his arrival.

But on the day he had noticed the change in Elizabeth's hair, there was a marked restraint in her manner when he came in for luncheon, and Carlotta, with the sensitiveness which makes children so quick to recognize the moods of their elders, was sitting on the couch, finger in mouth, and with widely opened eyes, which threatened tears.

"Tom, I must have a talk with you," said Elizabeth, her voice trembling a little as he looked inquiringly from one to the other.

"Have you two had a falling out?" he asked, laughing, but Elizabeth's expression checked his merriment.

"No, but I will tell you just what has happened, and then I want an explanation. Let me speak without interruption, and then I will hear what you have to say." He took off his coat and sat down without speaking, and Elizabeth faced him.

"The Italian woman who cleans this place came in this morning with her mop and pail, and Carlotta commenced chattering with her at once, and the woman laughed, so that I asked her what she was saying. She told me that Carlotta said she looked like her mother, and that she had the same kind of mop and pail. Of course, judging from the appearance and expensive clothing of the child, she thought it was absurd; but I got her to question Carlotta for me, and she persisted in her story, and described their home, which seems to consist of two overcrowded rooms on Mulberry Street." She paused, and Tom looked at her with no trace of embarrassment.

"Well, what of it?" he asked, defiantly. "The child was telling the truth, and there is no reason to punish her."

"Punish her!" exclaimed Elizabeth, taken aback. "It is not a question of what she has said or done; but of your conduct. Rich Italians do not live in two rooms on Mulberry Street, and you have deceived me and humiliated me by using this means to give me money."

"Nothing of the sort," he replied. "I haven't deceived you; although I will admit that you deceived yourself, and I did not set you right. The child's father was one of my mother's gardeners in Florence, and when he decided to bring his large family over here, she gave him a letter to me. He came to my office the morning after we dined together, and I went to see his family, and fell in love with Carlotta at once. The father was delighted to have her portrait painted, and I thought it would be better to get fresh clothes for such an important occasion."

"But immigrants are not making advance payments which are more than I should have charged for a half-dozen portraits, and you have done this simply to cloak an advance of money to me," she said, indignantly. "I suppose that you meant it in kindness, but you have put me under an obligation which I hate and which it will take me years to repay."

"There is no question of obligation," he replied, gently. "If I, as the child's foster father, wish a portrait of her, it is my own business whom I get to paint it, and how much I pay for it. I have made arrangements to care for Carlotta, and I wish you to finish the portrait for me, so that I may have something to remember her and this happy time by, when she grows up and leaves me."

"Oh, Tom, you must not take her away from me!" exclaimed Elizabeth, in dismay. "If you will let me finish this portrait and exhibit it, I am sure that it will bring me other orders, and then I can repay you and keep her with me."

"Do what? Keep the child with you?" asked Tom, in amazement.

"Yes, if you will help that much," she faltered. "I have thought it all out since the woman translated for me. I know that I can get other orders from this portrait, and I will be able to keep her, if the parents will permit it, and they have so many children that I am sure they will. Oh, Tom, it has been so lonely here, and now I can't let you come any more--and I want her so!" She covered her face with her hands, and, although Tom was not a man to be amused by a woman's tears, he smiled and winked solemnly at the frightened looking child, before he took them and held them in his own.

"Elizabeth Thornton," he said, seriously, "I will not relinquish my claim on Carlotta, and if you want her, you must take me, too. It is time to stop this foolishness about 'life work,' and to remember that you are a woman, with all the weaknesses of the sex, which we condone, and with all of its sweetness, which we love."

Carlotta looked at them wonderingly as Elizabeth put her arms around his neck and her head on his breast; but when he raised Elizabeth's face and kissed her lips, she clapped her tiny hands and gave a crow of joy; for she knew that her friends had found happiness.

SONG

Love planted my rose in his garden fair-- My rose of heart's delight-- And he laughed with joy when he saw it bear A crown of blossoms bright.

But the harsh wind shattered the petals red 'Twixt darkness and the dew; What blossoms were living, what blooms were dead, Ah, Love nor cared nor knew!

CHARLOTTE BECKER.

THE DESPOT

By JOHNSON MORTON

It was the boast of the summer dwellers in Roscoe that they had not spoiled the place. Mr. William Bangs was reiterating this to his wife's niece, who stood regarding his potato patch rather disdainfully through the glamour of a lorgnette.

"You see, Annie, my house is no better than my neighbors', my land not so good," he went on. "We keep no servants, in the accepted sense, only the girls whom you have seen--farmers' daughters from the mountain road--or, as your aunt Mary _will_ put it, 'We look to the hills whence cometh our _help_.' And the outside work is done by Paterson Roscoe and myself, with occasional aid in haying time. The Smiths live in quite the same fashion, the Jacksons, with all their money, just as simply, and the Babbits and Thomases follow the lead. As a result"--he dug his hoe into a hill of potatoes and Miss Jenkins drew back a high-heeled slipper from the contact--"we have an ideal community. The villagers haven't lost their proper sense of democracy and equality. And we--the outsiders--have learned much from meeting these plain, simple folk on their own ground. So I don't really approve of this plan of yours. It's a tremendous innovation. We've got on quite well enough for nearly four years without entertainments, save those which are, so to speak, indigenous and natural. I don't at all like the idea of vaudeville, and I abhor a raffle!"

"But the church does need the money so much, Uncle William," the girl interrupted, "and it's a Unitarian church, so the raffle doesn't matter. Mr. Blythe says he sees no objection to it if it's conducted properly, and everyone is so interested. All the Pungville people will come in quite a procession, and Tom Mason is to drive the performers over on his coach."

"Oh, if Tom Mason's the reason"--uncle William's hoe rested helplessly--"there's nothing more to be said." Annie frowned behind a smile. "But we've been thanking Heaven every night of our lives that nineteen stiff miles lay between us and that barbarous Pungville."

He picked up a handful of warm, brown potatoes and threw them into the basket.

"My dear girl, you're a wonder! You've been here five days, and you'll tear down in just that time what it has taken us four years to build up."

"Then have I your blessing?"

The girl showed roguish under her insistence, but uncle William shook his head. "The best you'll get from me, young woman, is a most reluctant sufferance. You are hopeless. I don't see why you asked me at all, with the thing as good as settled. Go on; but don't come back to your old uncle with the demoralization of an entire village on your conscience."

"Nonsense!" laughed the other. "That won't trouble me one bit. Just now I'm much more concerned as to what you're to do for us at the fair--something that will be popular and yet entail no loss of dignity." She regarded him quizzically. "Ah! I have it! Fortunes told by the cards! A magician in gown and fez, behind a curtain. Slight extra charge, flattering and profitable alike." She clapped her hands and Mr. Bangs groaned.

"Don't make me face details yet."

He struck at another potato hill, and Annie turned to the road. "Wait a minute," he called after her; "this is serious. Have you spoken to Miss Pamela yet?"

"Miss Pamela Roscoe, you mean? No, of course not; why should I?"

"Why should you?" Uncle William leaned on his hoe and fixed her with stern eye. "Easier a brick without straw, a law without a legislature, than to foist an idea, a plan, a measure on this village save in one way. My dear Annie, haven't you found out in five days that Miss Pamela is chief of the clan? Sister, aunt, cousin, in varying degrees, to every Roscoe and Collamer in the township--and there are no others worthy the count. Don't you know that she lives in the biggest house, has money in the bank, owns railroad stock, preserves opinions and never goes out of doors? That last is enough to surround her with a wall of mystery, and her own personality does the rest. Her position is almost feudal; the others may be jealous, most of the women are, for she is as acquisitive as she is dogmatic, and somehow she has been able to deflect nearly all the family possessions to her own line of inheritance; but, though they scold behind her back, they bend the knee, every one of them.

"You really must see her and get her consent, or gradually you will have the whole village backing out of its agreements. You'd better go before she hears of the plan from anyone else. I dare say you're too late already. You'll need all your diplomacy, and I wouldn't attempt it till after dinner. Get some points from your aunt Mary. We'll talk it over by and by. Now, speaking of dinner, do you mind taking these potatoes to Cassandra as you go by the kitchen door? They're my very first. They're late enough, but I guess I'm a week ahead of Smith, anyway. Thank you." He turned to his work again.

* * * * *

Miss Pamela Roscoe lived in a large house freshly painted white, with dark green blinds, chronically closed. To the front door wandered a box-bordered gravel path, and up this avenue Annie Jenkins walked in the red radiance of the September afternoon. Like a good soldier, she had donned her brightest armor, and her muslin skirts flicked in a friendly yet business-like way against the green. She raised the heavy brass knocker, its rattle shook the door and echoed through an empty hall.

Miss Pamela Roscoe heard the sound, and went softly, with no show of haste, to a window that commanded what is, in local parlance, known as a _handsome view_ of the front porch, from which vantage she remarked her visitor through peeping shutters.

But she waited--it is not considered good form in Roscoe to admit a stranger too eagerly--for a decent interval to elapse. Thanks to aunt Mary's coaching, Annie did not knock again, but stood in pretty decision with her eyes straight before her. A leisurely footstep sounded within; the latch lifted with dignity, the door opened a crack at first, then more widely; and, outlined against a blacker background, stood the tall, stern, forbidding figure of Miss Pamela Roscoe herself!

She was a lady of fateful appearance, black-haired and pale, with a marvelous impression of preservation. Her manner was of the _nil admirari_ sort, and her voice what Annie afterward described as _mortuary_. The girl murmured her name, a wan smile welcomed her.

"Come right in, Miss Jenkins," the gloomy voice began, "only I don't want you should step off that oilcloth. I ain't going to get that carpet all tracked up. You go right on into the front room"--a gaunt arm pushed her toward a darker space--"and I'll open up there in a minute."

Miss Pamela, at the window, threw back the shutter, rolled up a curtain and the western sunlight filled the place. Annie took the chair which her hostess dusted ostentatiously, a stout, wooden rocker with a tidy--Bo-Peep in outline stitch in red--flapping cozily at its back but Miss Roscoe still stood.

"It ain't hospitable, I know," her monotone apologized; "a first visit, too--but I'm going to ask you to excuse me a minute right at the set-off. When you knocked, I was buying some berries of the Collamer twins, and just a-measuring of them. I don't allow no one to measure in my house but myself, if they are my grand-nephews, and I most ought to go back to the summer kitchen to finish and pay 'em--if you don't mind. There's the album and last week's paper, and you just make yourself to home till I get back."

Left alone, in somewhat austere comfort, Miss Jenkins' eyes wandered over the room, from the strips of bunting at the windows--black alternating with red, white and blue, which a card in pale, cramped writing explained: "In Memory of Garfield, 1881"--to two elaborate fly-catchers which did duty as chandeliers from vantage points of the ceiling. The simpler, made of straw tied with bows of red worsted, paled before the glories of the other--a structure of silver cardboard in cubes, the smaller depending from the corners of the larger in diminishing effect, ribbon-bound, with a gleaming pearl bead in the center of each.

A pair of strange tables, laden with still stranger ornaments, filled the larger spaces of the floor and bore testimony to the prowess of some pioneer in the line of industrial adornment.

"Poor soul," thought the girl, "here is the decorative instinct untrammeled by imitation. Individuality inherent! Unkind fate, furnishing no models, has produced originality." She walked toward the larger table for closer scrutiny just as Miss Pamela re-entered the room. A faint accent of gratification colored the latter's voice.

"I see you looking at them stands," she said; "mosaic, I call 'em. I made every stitch of 'em myself. Soft pine they are; my brother Nathan gave me the wood, and I'd been saving the pieces of crockery for years. You cut places in the wood and stick 'em in close in patterns with colors that look pretty together--sometimes you have to use a hammer--and then you sandpaper the rough places--it's terrible on the hands--and put on a couple of coats o' shellac. I call 'em pretty handsome. Cousin Parthenia Roscoe was here the day I was finishing them, and I tell you she admired 'em. Those crackle ware pieces were from an old pitcher of her mother's that came to me--it got broken, and I worked 'em in at the corners. I don't set no great store by that alum cross. They're kind o' common, but it turned out so nice I let it stand there. How did I make it? Why you just take a cross of wood and wind it with yarn and let it hang overnight in a solution of alum and water, and in the morning it's all crystal. 'Tain't no work; but, land's sakes! there's enough to make up in those wax autumn leaves; I call that a likely spray of woodbine. It took me the bigger part of three mornings to get it done, and 'twas in the winter I made it, so I didn't have nothing to go by but my memory."

She pinched the stiff little garland into a more aggressive attitude, and turned, with a sort of caress, to a jar of colored pampas grass that flaunted itself in the corner. Annie's eyes followed the motion, and Miss Pamela answered the question in them by handing her the jar for a closer inspection.

There was pride in her voice as she spoke, though her tone was casual. "It's just one of my _what-not_ vases, I call 'em. I invented it myself. 'Twas a blacking bottle, to begin with, but I covered it with putty, good and thick, and then I stuck all them things on it. Here's a peach-stone basket and a couple of Florida beans and some seashells that were brought me from down East. The sleeve buttons on the front were broken, but I think they stand up well, and that gold paint does set off the whole. It's been imitated, you'll find," she added, dismally, "but the idea's original with me."

She replaced the jar in its corner. Then, as a sudden realization of the duty of a hostess seized her, she seated herself decorously in a stiff-backed chair opposite her visitor, and, adjusting primly what is technically known as a "front breadth," gave herself unreservedly to polite inquiry.

"Is your health good?" she asked, with an air of expecting the worst.

"Oh, very good, indeed," said Annie, conscious that she brought disappointment on the wings of her voice.

"It has been a sickly season," remarked the elder lady.

"I am always well," laughed Annie, but it was the ghost of a laugh.

"And is Mr. Bangs well, and your aunt?" The voice rose at the last word--expectantly. And Annie clutched at the fact that she had left aunt Mary lying down at home.

"My uncle? Yes. But my aunt has a headache. Otherwise she'd have come with me this afternoon."

"She'd better keep quiet." Miss Pamela shook her head. "A cousin of mine, over Rutland way--Andromeda Spear, you've heard of her, maybe--your aunt always puts me in mind of her--she used to have headaches like that, and she wouldn't hear to reason about 'em. So she kept on her feet when she'd ought to be lyin' down, and one day--'twas a fall day, like this, I remember--she had a seizure in the hen house, and she never got over it--though she lingered for years," she added, by way of consideration.

"But, you see, Miss Roscoe, we have no hen house," retorted Annie, with a sort of flippant desperation.

"Well, there's plenty of places," remarked the other, sententiously. "Bed's not the only place to die in, and I've always believed in proper precautions. You give Miss Bangs my respects, and tell her that she can't be too careful."

Then followed a fusillade of questions--the length of her stay, her graduation from college in June, her likelihood of marriage, and her religious beliefs.

Dazed, depleted, the girl's answers grew monosyllabic, in spite of an air of forced gayety which she strove hard to maintain. Somehow the inherent and masterful depression of her hostess was weighing her down. Outside the sun had settled in clouds, and a somber twilight stole in through the window. The voice opposite droned on, engrossing, dominating, hypnotic. Annie realized that unless she roused herself she would relapse into permanent silence, and so, in a lucky pause, as her eyes fell upon a strange object hanging above the mantelpiece, she grew aggressive for the moment, and boldly asked a question herself.

"Pardon my interrupting, Miss Roscoe, but do you mind telling me what is that mysterious and interesting--_thing_?"

Miss Pamela's gaze followed the turn of Annie's head. She rose grimly from her seat and went to the further corner of the room, whence she abstracted a yardstick and stood before the fire-board. Deftly she pushed off a cloth that enshrouded the object, and disclosed what had evidently been, at one time, a chromo of vast dimensions; its bright gilt frame remained intact, but the picture itself was entirely obliterated by successive coatings of her useful gold paint, and to the center was affixed half of a flower basket--the flaring kind--cut longitudinally. This basket, also gilded heavily, was filled with a varied profusion of artificial fruits.

Annie turned her chair. Miss Pamela cleared her throat and pointed with the yardstick.

"It's not a _thing_, Miss Jenkins," she began, with some severity, "but a sort of monument that I have made--I call it my 'Memorial Fruit Piece.'" There was about Miss Roscoe something of the pride of the discoverer, and she warmed to her subject.

"You see, ours was a large family, and, from time to time, many of us were taken away--'called home,' you might say--and those that went left to those that remained a good many relics and keepsakes like. They came to mother first, and after mother's death they came to me, and I had 'em round in bureau drawers and bandboxes and trunks, and they was in the way when I was cleaning house or making changes of arrangements, and I won't say that such as was fabrics wasn't attracting moths. But I couldn't think of no way to remedy it. Till suddenly--let's see, 'twas eleven weeks ago last Tuesday--the idea came to me, and I grouped 'em together, like you see 'em here--this tribute."

Her yardstick touched the basket lovingly, as she went on: "That banana, on the extreme left, contains my grandfather's gold-bowed spectacles, jest as he used to wear 'em. Gran'pa grew terrible deaf when he got to be an old man, and so he never heard a team coming up behind him one day when mother'd sent him down to the store for a loaf of bread. Miss Jenkins, them glasses was on his nose just as lifelike when they brought him in to us! My mother's wedding ring is in that greengage plum next to the banana, and aunt Sophia Babcock's is in that damson, a little below to the right.

"You see that peach? Pretty lifelike, I call it--well, there ain't anything in it yet, but my great-uncle Bradly's shirtstuds are in the Bartlett pear, just beyond, and that orange contains a Honiton lace collar that my mother wore the day she was married.

"And this Baldwin apple"--her voice grew intimate--"has in it some little relics of my own uncle Aaron Roscoe. He was a good man, and he felt the call early, and he journeyed to heathen lands to carry the glad tidings, and we never heard from him again--till quite recent, when these little relics was sent back.

"Do you remember my brother Willy? Gracious, no! What was I thinking of? Of course you don't--your aunt Mary'd remember him, though. He was my youngest brother, and a great hand for all sorts of frolic and fun. Well, it's more'n thirty years ago, but it seems just yesterday that he fell in the mill pond. Sister Coretta was with him, and she'd let him get out of her sight--which she hadn't ought to--but, childlike, she'd got to playing with the shavings, and sticking 'em over her ears, and when she sensed things Willy wa'n't nowhere to be found. They drawed off the water, and there he was, poor little thing, and they brought him home and laid him on the kitchen table, and then mother and I, we went through his pockets to see what there was, and there we found a bag of marbles, just as he'd had 'em--and he was a great hand for marbles. Well, mother she kept 'em in her bureau drawer for years, and whenever she'd open the bureau drawer it would make her feel bad, 'cause she'd think of Willy, and after mother's death it made me feel bad to see 'em, 'cause I'd think of Willy and mother, too. Yet, somehow, I couldn't think of no way to put 'em in here till suddenly it occurred to me in the night--'twas three weeks ago come Friday--and I got up then and there and I covered 'em each with purple silk and made 'em into that bunch of grapes on the extreme right."

Miss Roscoe turned to her audience, her face rapt, as is the face of one who has gazed on a masterpiece. Annie recognized that now or never was her chance to state the errand that had brought her, to break through the strong reluctance that had held her at bay through the interview. She rose and held out her hand.

"It is--wonderful," she looked toward the memorial, "and I can't tell you how good it is of you to explain it all to me. I envy you the power you have of making--_wonderful_ things." The adjective crowded out every other in her vocabulary. "But I really came to ask you to do something for me, Miss Roscoe," she smiled at the sphinxlike figure. "I've been getting up a sort of fair, and it's going to be a great success--everybody in the village has promised to help, and my New York friends from Pungville are to give a sort of entertainment. I thought, you know--that you'd like to help, too, so I came to see what you'd be willing to do. We mean to have a sort of raffle."

Miss Roscoe maintained her air of pathetic sternness.

"And wouldn't you like to give something that we could take shares in--something, perhaps, that you have made--one of your _what-not_ jars, or, if you're _very_ generous, why not the 'Memorial Fruit Piece'?"

She stopped, somewhat staggered by the daring of her own suggestion. Miss Pamela had replaced the yardstick in its corner, and Annie was conscious of a vague relief when it was out of the way. She rested her hand on the Bo-Peep chair and waited.

Miss Pamela folded her thin arms across her breast, and regarded her calmly.

"Miss Jenkins, I don't think there's going to be any fair," she remarked, succinctly.

The blood of youth boiled at the finality of it. "Oh, yes, there is, Miss Roscoe; I told you that I'd made all the arrangements."

"Well, _I've_ been making some arrangements, too."

"And everybody's going to help--your cousin, Mrs. Collamer, and Dorothea Roscoe and Roscoe Collamer and Mrs. Collamer Roscoe and your cousin Paterson."

"Paterson, indeed!" Miss Roscoe's voice showed its first touch of warmth as she seized the conversation. "Miss Jenkins," she said, "you're a young woman, and a well-meaning one, and my feelings toward you are kindly. But a mistake has been made. There ain't going to be any fair!

"I know all about your plans, knew 'em from the minute you started talking 'em over with the minister and cousin Parthenia, down at the meeting house. After she left you, she came right over and told me."

"But she seemed very enthusiastic," began Annie, feebly.

"Yes, _seemed_," interrupted the older woman, "but she didn't dare! Cousin Parthenia never set herself up against me yet, and she's getting a little too well on in years to begin. Next day there was quite a meeting of our folks here. My back gate kept a-clicking till sundown. All but Paterson came, Miss Jenkins, and he's less than half a Roscoe, and no Collamer at all. His mother was one of them white-livered Lulls, from Pomfret. He's bound, anyway, to stand by you, because he's getting wages from your uncle. Well, I settled it all then and there, this fair business, I mean, but I told them to wait, for I some expected to see you!"

Annie's eyes opened wide. "I meant to come before; I'm afraid I am a little late." Her attitude was deprecatory; it might have moved a stone, but it produced no impression on her listener.

"I'm afraid you are," Miss Pamela assented, gloomily. "I'm an old woman, and there ain't much left to me, but I don't mean to let the authority that I've always had in my family be taken away by any outsider. If you'd come to me _first_, Miss Jenkins, things might have been arranged different; but that's over now, and I was always one to let bygones be bygones."

Annie had moved to the hall, while her hostess fumbled at the door. It opened and let in a whiff of cool air and sounds of crickets on the grass.

"Autumn is here," remarked Miss Roscoe, impersonally, addressing the world at large. Then she called to the girl between the box rows. Was there a touch of amusement in the mortuary voice?

"I presume you'll hear from the folks to-morrow that they've changed their minds. Do drop in again some time. I've enjoyed your visit, and don't forget to tell Miss Bangs to be careful of her headache!"

* * * * *

At home they were all in the dining room. Annie stood in the doorway, taking the pins out of her straw hat.

"Well?" called uncle William from the head of the table.

"Far from it," replied the girl. Her cheeks burned, as she shook her head, but there was a glint of laughter in her eyes. She smoothed out her veil, pinned it to the hat and tossed them both in the hall, as she sank into her chair.

"I'll have a lot to tell you after supper, but here are a few facts to occupy you till then:

"_First_, there isn't going to be any fair!

"_Second_, I believe I shall accept the Masons' invitation, after all, and spend next week in Pungville.

"_Third_, behold in me a woman who knows when she is _beaten_!

"_Last_, my afternoon's experiences have made me as hungry as a bear. Uncle William, I am preparing to eat four of those big, baked potatoes in front of you, and, Aunt Mary, please let Cassandra bring in a large pitcher of cream!"

WALL STREET

By ROBERT STEWART

Sir Richard Steele, in describing the Spectator Club, remarks of the Templer that "most of his thoughts are fit for conversation, as few of them are derived from business." Nevertheless, almost any man should be able to philosophize more or less pleasantly and instructively over his calling, and if statesmen, soldiers, lawyers and medical gentlemen write autobiographies and describe the various debates, campaigns, litigations and horrible operations they have been engaged in, why should not an old stockbroker chat about his business, and give a little "inside information," perhaps, about that Street whose ways are supposed to be so tortuous?

Go into the Waldorf any afternoon you please, and see which has the more attentive audience, Mr. Justice Truax discussing cases, or Mr. Jakey Field tipping his friends on sugar. Watch the women at a tea and see how their eyes brighten when young Bull, of the Stock Exchange, comes in. Bull has a surer road to smiles and favor than all the flowers and compliments in New York--he has a straight tip from John Gates.

Business not fit for conversation! Ask Mr. Morgan if anybody fidgets when _he_ talks? Has any clergyman as eager a congregation as the audience Mr. Clews preaches to from the platform in front of his quotation board every morning at eleven o'clock?

"Come, ye disconsolate," then, and if I can't tell you how to make money, I venture to assert I can interest you in the place where you lost it.

There is no place of business, indeed, so pictorial as Wall Street. Sunk down amid huge buildings which wall it in like precipices, with a graveyard yawning at its head and a river surging at its feet, its pavement teeming with an eager, nervous multitude, its street rattling with trucks laden with gold and silver bricks, its soil mined with treasure vaults and private wires, its skyline festooned with ticker tape, its historic sense vindicated by the heroic statue of Washington standing in majestic serenity on the portico of that most exquisite model of the Parthenon, and with the solemn sarcasm of the stately brown church, backed by its crumbling tombstones, lifting its slender spire like a prophetic warning finger in its pathway--this most impressive and pompous of thoroughfares is at once serious and lively, solid and vivacious. You say to yourself this must be a vast business which is so grandly domiciled; and you wonder if the men live up to the buildings.

The broker, in fact, who fills the eye of pictorial satire and the country press, is not an admirable object. His tall hat and shiny boots are in too obvious a foreground in sketches of race meetings, uptown cafes and flash clubs. He is represented as a maddened savage on 'Change, and a reckless debauchee at leisure, who analyzes the operations of finance in the language of a monte dealer describing a prize fight, and whose notion of a successful career is something between a gambler, a revolutionist and a buccaneer. He is supposed to vibrate in cheerful nonchalance between Delmonico's and a beanery, according as he is in funds or hard up, and to exhibit a genial assurance that "a member of the New York Stock Exchange, sir," will prove a pleasant addition to the most exclusive circles.

This happy-go-lucky gentleman, however, to use one of his own delightful metaphors, "cuts very little ice" in the region where he is believed to exert himself most effectively. He is really but the froth, riding lightly on the speculative current. Still, I have placed him, like Uriah, "in the forefront of the battle," while we draw back a little, because he is the caricature of that stocking-broking man-about-town Wall Street has had the honor to create, and because in popular fancy he is seen standing, like Washington, before the doors of the Stock Exchange, with a gold pencil in one hand and a pad in the other, ready to pounce on the pocketbooks of parsons and schoolmistresses.

Parsons and schoolmistresses actually do come to Wall Street; all the world comes here, incorporates its idioms into its dialect and is infected with its spirit. It is a lounge for men of pleasure, a study for men of learning, an El Dorado for men of adventure, and a market for men of business. It has a habitat and a manner, a character and a vernacular. It bristles with incongruity and contradiction, yet it is as logical as a syllogism.

Superficially, everything is manipulation, chance, accident. Really, every fluctuation is regulated by laws of science, and, with adequate knowledge and just deduction, profit is not speculative but certain. It is this which differentiates it from all mere gambling. And it is this union of impulse and logic which makes it so human, so humorous, so dramatic and pathetic.

Perhaps its most curious incongruity is its combination of secrecy and frankness. The atmosphere about the Stock Exchange fairly palpitates with suspicion and subterfuge. No man knows what another man is about, and every man bends his energy to find out. "Inside information" is the philosopher's stone that turns every fraction into golden units. The leading firms take the greatest pains to conceal their dealings. Orders are given in cipher. Certificates are registered in the names of clerks. Large blocks of stock are bought, and sold, and "crossed," for the mere purpose of misleading. A wink or a shrug is accepted as more significant than the most positive assertion. The disposition to "copper a point" is so general that the late Mr. Gould used to say he always told the truth, because nobody ever believed him.

The very penny chroniclers of the market acquire an infelicitous adroitness in the phraseology of deceit. And yet nowhere on earth is ignorance so carefully counseled and so almost ludicrously warned as in this place of trickery and innuendo.

What conceivable enterprise which expected to exist on public patronage would assume as the unofficial metaphor of dealings a pair of wild beasts bellowing and growling over the carcass of a lamb, and make this most helpless and stupid of animals the representation of the customer? To call a trader a lamb is as opprobrious an epithet as it was to call a Norman baron an Englishman.

In any other business the buyer is an honored and privileged patron; in Wall Street he is welcomed with the respect and pleasure that was exhibited to a bailiff serving a writ in Alsatia. Should he stroll guilelessly into the Exchange he proposes to benefit, he is set upon, mobbed, hustled, mussed and finally ejected from the door with a battered hat and torn coat collar. Every other broking office in the Street has a pictorial caricature hanging over its ticker of his hesitancy and timidity, his rash venture, his silly and short-lived hilarity, his speedy and inevitable ruin, and his final departure, with his face distorted by rage and grief, and his pockets turned inside out.

The air is thick with signs and evil portents: Stop-loss orders, breaks, raids, slumps, more margins, are in everybody's mouth. The path to fortune is emphasized as slippery by every adjective of peril, and is hedged with maxims, over each of which is dangling, like a horrible example, the corpse of a ruined speculator.

A too subtle analyst might suggest that this presentation of opportunity and restraint, while apparently incongruous, is the most fascinating form of temptation. But subtlety, except in manipulating stock values, is not a Wall Street characteristic. The Stock Exchange is an arena where men fight hand to hand, head to head. Beneath the conventions of courtesy, each man's fists are guarding his pockets and his eyes are on his neighbor. Such a vocation breeds courage, quickness, keenness, coolness. Weak men and fools are weeded out with surprising celerity and certainty.

Wall Street men are frank because they have learned it is wisest. The average commission broker secretly regards his clients with a feeling of benevolence delicately tinctured with contempt. Experience teaches him to use a favorite professional phrase, that there are times when "you can't keep the public out of the market with a club," and that when engaged in stock operations they usually display the judgment of a child picking sweets out of a box. His first care, naturally, is to protect himself, financially and otherwise, against the losses which ensue. Hence he surrounds their transactions with every legal and friendly restraint. But his existence depends on their success, or in replacing them. The broker, therefore, is quite as anxious for his clients to make money as they are themselves. More profit, more margin; more margin, more commissions and less risk. There you have it in a nutshell.

The stockbroker says to the public: "My dear sir, here is an open market. Nowhere else can you get such large and quick returns on so small an investment. For these opportunities I charge you the ridiculously small percentage of one-eighth of one per cent., and loan you, besides, ninety per cent. of your investment. Could any man with a proper regard for his wife and children do better by you? You own whatever security you buy, and get its dividend. Your margin is your equity in it. In property whose market value fluctuates so widely and rapidly, I naturally require you to keep your margin at the per cent. agreed upon. If, unfortunately, it becomes exhausted, I, as mortgagee, foreclose at the best price obtainable. I shall be pleased to execute all orders with which you may favor me on the above basis, in all securities dealt in on the New York Stock Exchange, reserving to myself, of course, the right to refuse to carry any security I do not care to loan my capital on. Some are risky, some safe, some inactive. All speculation implies risk.

"I beg you to remember my relation with you is only to execute your orders. You must use your own judgment. I should advise you, nevertheless, to keep in the active stocks. Opportunities for quick and profitable turns in them are more frequent, and the broader the market, the closer the trades, and the less the difficulty of disposal. Union Pacific, just now, looks good for a rise. They tell me, confidentially, that the Rockefellers are buying it, but I know nothing about it. It acts all right. Mr. Jones, this is my partner, Mr. Robinson. I've just been telling Mr. Jones, Robinson, that we hear the Rockefellers are buying U. P. There it is, three-quarters, on the board now----"

And the broker glances over the quotation board, grabs his hat, and flies to the "floor," shaking his head and saying to himself: "I'll give that fellow just six months to drop his wad."

Well, is it his fault? He has been honest with you, frank with you. Be sure he will help you make money if he can.

"I did _my_ best for him--damn fool!" is the mental summary inclosed along with many a closing-out statement.

To the visitor accustomed to regard Wall Street as a vast faro layout, its very face should be a striking object-lesson.

Emerging from the lofty and beautiful hallway of the Empire Building, those stupendous heights of stone and glass which confront him in solid squares are evidently not the creations of the baccarat table and the roulette wheel. The most dignified temples of chance are designed to shelter pleasure and frivolity. These huge homes of the corporation and the bank, with entrances as sternly embellished as palaces of justice, are oppressively significant of business.

As one crosses Broadway and descends to Broad Street, the impression deepens, stirs, until you realize you are standing in a place of strength and power, in the very heart of the nation's financial life. The crowd of curb brokers yelling out quotations before the Stock Exchange seems merely a casual and ludicrous episode, and the Stock Exchange itself but a factor in this tremendous neighborhood.

Here is a world force which expresses itself on land and sea, and in the heaven above; which has built itself an abode that is the wonder of man; which bids fleets go forth, transports armies, and commands in foreign senates; which restrains kings in their wrath; which feeds the peasant on the banks of the Gloire, and clothes the coolie toiling in the rice fields of Honan.

You stand there, I say, and recognize that you are in the presence of the creative energy of millions of men and machines building, hauling, planting, laboring, all over the world; and then you go into your broker's office and hear slim young gentlemen talk of "playing the market," and you don't wonder the broker is cynical and careful.

This serious, solid, fundamental character of Wall Street, performing amid its colossal setting, an important and essential office in the world's work, must be conscientiously painted in and emphasized in any portrait, however gay and frolicsome, which attempts to depict its spirit.

This sense of drama, indeed, this consciousness that tremendous things are happening while we amuse ourselves, is one of the causes which make Wall Street so fascinating. You can take it as seriously or as frivolously as you please. You can operate with all the statistics of "Poor's Manual" and "The Financial Chronicle" packed into your head, or you can trade with the gay abandon of M. D'Artagnan breakfasting under the walls of La Rochelle.

I have said all the world comes here, and the more I reflect upon it, as a man of twenty years' experience, the less I wonder. The wonder is that anybody stays away. It is so tempting, so amusing, so respectable, so reckless or cautious, as you choose.

In appearance, a broker's office is something between a club parlor and a bank, and it unconsciously represents its business. The room is spacious and richly carpeted. The great quotation board, with that jumping jack of a boy bobbing up and down on the platform before it, is of solid mahogany. The chairs are large and comfortable. From the great windows you can look out on the varied and beautiful panorama of the Hudson and the harbor, the water flashing in the sunlight and lively with tugs, schooners, steamers, yachts. On the table are all sorts of stock reports, newsfiles, financial statements.

The daily papers are in a rack, and over the mantel are bound volumes of the "Chronicle," and copies of "Poor's Manual." Here is a commodious desk with note paper, order pads and so forth for your use. By the quotation board the ticker is clicking busily, and next it Dow-Jones' news machine is clacking out printed copy that the newsboy will be howling "Extra" over an hour afterward. Cigars in the table drawer await your acceptance.

A knot of gentlemen are chatting about the ticker; some more are watching the board. An old man with a white beard is dozing in a corner with a "Reading Annual Report" on his knee. If you are a quick and accurate judge of values, here is a means of livelihood under the most agreeable, gentlemanly and easy auspices. You are making your fortune seated comfortably among your friends, so to speak, smoking and chatting pleasantly.

Every minute something happens, and every other event is a financial opportunity. A boy rushes in with a news slip that Russia is to coerce China--wheat rises. Chicago unloads stocks to buy grain--shares decline a point all round. A money broker in to offer a million dollars, and he _knows_ the City Bank people are buying Amalgamated Copper. There is a sudden chorus of greetings and smiles; the popular man of the office has arrived unexpectedly from London. The telephone rings; the board member sends word the market looks like a buy.

"Mr. Morgan has started for the Steel meeting," reads the manager, from the news machine. "The div-i-dend on Steel"--whirr--whirr--clack, clack, clack--"one per cent." ... "regular."

"Gee whiz! Look at Steel," calls the tape trader. "Three-quarters, one-half, one-quarter, one-eighth, one! See 'em come. _Three thousand_ at a clip. Sell 'em! Sell me two hundred, Robinson, quick!"

A clubman drops in with a funny story. Somebody offers to match you for lunch. A friend invites you, over the telephone, to dine with him. You conclude to take your profit in Wabash Preferred on the rally. It is three o'clock and "closing" before you know it, and time to run over to Fred Eberlin's and have Frank mix you a cocktail.

But aside from a profitable acquaintance with values, I know of no place equal to a stockbroking office for the acquirement of that general and intimate knowledge of men and of the town, which, organized and classified, constitutes the science of life. Here congregate men of every conceivable calling and character, all meeting on the equal and easy terms of a reputable pursuit, and all more or less under the influence of the natural and perfectly selfish ambition of money making.

One has only to observe them to be instructed. They are well groomed. They are rosy and plump. Any one of them evidently could sit down at the desk and write you a check any minute. Whatever they may be elsewhere, whether their private lives are distinguished and benevolent or riotous and shameless, whether their margins are the fruit of admirable diligence or the purloined inheritance of the widow and the orphan, while they are here these men are capitalists. They have the feelings, the ideals, the desires and fears of the rich.

Here is a railway president amusing himself taking a flier in sugar, while he waits for his steamer. He is chatting with a tobacco manufacturer who sold out to the Trust. On that sofa by the window Jerry Jackson, the bookmaker, is whispering a point to a man of pleasure from the Knickerbocker Club. There is a clergyman from Chelsea Seminary talking to a doctor smelling of iodoform. The two tall gentlemen laughing with the manager are lawyers who will be scowling fiercely at each other presently before Recorder Goff.

The man with his hand in a bag is a mine owner from Colorado, showing a copper specimen to a dry-goods merchant on his way to the Custom House. The man with his nose glued to the ticker globe is a professional operator who trades from the tape. And that hungry-looking person who has just rushed in is a bankrupt tipster, making a precarious and pitiful existence, like a woman of the town, out of the means of his ruin.

Graduates of Oxford and alumni of Harvard rub elbows with City Hall politicians, and farmers from Kansas and Pennsylvania exchange market opinions with men of science.

It is only for short intervals that the customers in broking offices can be busy. At other times they must lounge, and smoke; and chat, and read, and watch the board. A good-sized concern may easily have two hundred running accounts. Can you imagine a livelier, more entertaining place of gossip? You can have stocks, horses, commerce, law, medicine, small talk, art, science, the theater and religion in fifteen minute _causeries_, every day if you like. You have the _milieu_ of every club in New York and the Waldorf cafe massed in one elegant composition in more than one broker's parlor.

I once knew a clever fellow who dined out every evening. He always had the latest scandal, the newest story, the straightest tip and the last word from Washington. He knew all about stocks, grain, races, theaters, society, clubs, athletics. He could advise you about ocean steamers, table d'hote places, country hotels, Berlin pensions, young ladies' schools, where to buy Ayrshire bacon and who had a yacht to sell. And he acquired this vast and useful assortment of knowledge simply by spending his afternoons, from noon to three, at different Wall Street offices.

The brokers cordially welcome such a visitor. Now and again they carry a hundred shares of stock for him. He is a kind of private news agency. The dull office gets ready to laugh when _he_ comes in; and his tips, whispered merely out of friendship, of course, to the customers, add many a credit entry to Commission Account. It may be said, without any hysterical exaggeration, that he represents the worst of Wall Street; and that the worst of Wall Street is very bad. But among his virtues are a merry mind and an abiding faith that a "board member" is the most distinguished of associates.

The broker, indeed, if he is not always that most elevated of human spectacles, a Christian gentleman, is a highly pictorial and interesting person. He is the creature of his business, and is half host and half business man. His habitual chatty intercourse with all kinds of men of means gives him the easy nonchalance of the town, and the nervous strain he is constantly under to protect himself and his clients against those impulses of greed and fear so fostered by Wall Street, creates that keen, rapid concentration for which he is so remarkable.

Where everybody is liable to lose his wits any instant, it is necessary those in authority should be cool. This constant state of high tension, these perpetual changes from extreme concentration to frivolity, produce, in the end, the Wall Street manners, and the desire for exciting, highly colored amusements.

Every day in Wall Street is a completed day. It is a cash business. Your broker likes to talk about his trades over his after-dinner cigar, and to tell you, in the horsy, professional jargon of the Street, how he "pulled a thousand out of 'Paul,' and went home long of 'little Atch.'"

He is, like all nervous people, a social animal. He is gregarious by instinct and interest. Accustomed all day long to his exciting pursuit and his club-parlor office, he seeks society for amusement and profit. He wishes to chat with his friends and to increase his following. He has no wares to display. He has no monetary advantage to offer over any of the other seven or eight hundred commission men in the Exchange. All members must charge one-eighth of one per cent, per hundred shares, each way. Interest charges can't be very much reduced.

Every broker in Wall Street has inside information of some kind. His appeal, therefore, for commissions must rest on acquaintance and personality. He must know how to stimulate cupidity and create confidence. He must impress himself on as many people as possible as successful, honest, jolly, shrewd, well informed; a capital fellow and a first-rate business man. It is only fair to him to remark that whatever his faults, he almost invariably is a capital fellow and a first-rate business man. But is it extraordinary that this individual should become a man's man, a man about town?

Whether he is the blatant, vulgar wretch of the caricaturist, or the cultivated, polished person who justifies Wall Street's boast of being the aristocracy of trade, depends, of course, not on his being a broker, but on his being a gentleman.

His completed portrait, however, would be a too ambitious performance for the limits of my sketch, and I have made this little office study of him, as he leans against his ticker pinching the tape, with bits of board-room paper falling off his hat and a cigar between his teeth, simply to show the influence of his vocation on himself and on his companions.

The flavor of speculation permeates Wall Street like soot, and settles on the professional and the public alike. It is a sporty business. It appeals to the idle, the reckless, the prodigal and the _declasse_. In the quickness and uncertainty of its evolutions, it is unfortunately so analogous to racing and gaming that their terms are interchangeable, and to the thoughtless the stock market is the ranking evil in that unholy trinity.

"Stocks, papers and ponies," is the ringside slang for Wall Street, cards and horses. The sporting man finds it a no less hazardous, but an equally congenial and more respectable, means of money making, and he drifts into a broker's office as naturally as the broker relaxes his nerves--_similia similibus curantur_--spending half an hour over a roulette wheel in his client's "place."

The flash public very naturally choose the same pleasant road to fortune. To their minds, whether they place their money on "Reading Common" or on "Waterboy," the intention, the risk and the result are the same. There are "fake races" and "fake pools."

"The percentage will ruin you in the end," they warn you, "no matter what you play." And the business man, who should know better, too often enters the share market as if he were sitting in an open poker party, among sharpers and pickpockets, and recklessly surrenders himself to every temptation of this devil-may-care atmosphere, while he "plays the game."

It is this combination of the gambler, the sporting man, the fast broker, the frivolous and ignorant trader and the speculative public, all possessed with the mad passions of gain and fear, and all struggling more or less grimly in the maelstrom which boils about the Stock Exchange, that constitutes the Wall Street spirit.

It is a derisive goblin or a piteous, ineffective human soul, according as you are a laughing or a weeping philosopher. It expresses everything in the Street that is pictorial and dramatic; but Wall Street is first and last a realm of business. It is a strong man's country.

The men who built the buildings and work in them are giants. When they war, they hurl millions at each other, as the Titans did mountains. When they combine, civilization strides.

The Stock Exchange is their battleground. It is a dangerous place for ladies and civilians. It is best to be serious and cautious, and to keep one's eyes open, when one travels that way.

THE WIND'S WORD

O Wind of the wild sweet morning! You have entered the heart in me! And I'm fain to sing for life and spring And all young things that be!

O whispering wind of the shadow! A voice from the day that is past, You make me fain for the home again And quiet love at last.

ARTHUR KETCHUM.

THE BOY MAN

By THE BARONESS VON HUTTEN

Among other things, Lady Harden knew when to be silent, and now, having made her speech, she sat watching Cleeve, as, aghast, he dropped his rod until its flexible tip lay on the darkening water, and stared off toward the house.

She had said it, and its effect on him was much what she had expected it to be.

He was so young that his strength, she knew, was largely potential; only she, as far as she knew, had ever observed its potentiality; to others he was a handsome, merry, young animal, "keen on girls," as he himself called it, and as innocent of any comprehension of the deeper meanings of life as a pleasant poodle pup.

She, being of those who have eyes to see, had, during the three days she had known him, watched him closely, with the result that he interested her.

And now she had said to him this thing that so utterly disconcerted him.

Partly out of kindness she had said it, and partly because it was the quickest way to fix his genial but roving attention where she wished it to be--on herself.

He was so young that her five years of seniority, and the existence of her eleven-year-old son, had, to his mind, separated her from him by something like a generation. He had found her a ripper as to looks, awfully jolly to talk to and no end of a musician.

But he had never thought of her as belonging to his own class in years, and she knew this.

And as she watched him first shrink and then straighten himself under the blow she had given him, she knew that her first move was a success.

For over a minute he did not speak. Then he looked up.

"How in the devil did you find that out?" he asked, abruptly.

"I saw it. Do you mind my warning you?"

"Good gracious, no. It's--most awfully kind of you. I--I really never thought of such a thing. You see, she was always a great pal of Dudley's--my eldest brother's."

Lady Harden laughed.

"So she seemed too old for--that sort of thing? I see. In fact, I _saw_ from the first, and that is why I ventured---- We have drifted nearly to the willows, by the way."

He laid his neglected rod in the bottom of the boat, and rowed in silence until his companion resumed, lighting a cigarette, and speaking with easy deliberation between puffs: "She is thirty-four, and--that is not old, nowadays. The Duke of Cornwall is crazy to marry her, by the way."

"Cornwall!"

"Cornwall. And--there are others. My dear Teddy--may I, a contemporary of Miss--Methuselah--call you Teddy? Are you really so _naif_ as not to have known?"

It was almost dark, but she could still see the flush that burnt his face at the question.

"I hadn't the slightest idea," he protested, indignantly, jerking the boat into the boathouse.

"But why have you been making love to her so--outrageously?"

She rose and stood balancing herself gracefully while she lit a fresh cigarette. Her figure was remarkably good.

"Making love to her? I? Nonsense!" he returned, rudely. "She's the best dancer in the house, and the best sort, all round--those Warringham girls are frights, and the little Parham thing is--poisonous."

"But--at breakfast, who fetched her eggs and bacon? Who made her tea? Who----"

She held out her hand as she spoke, and leaned on him as she got out of the boat.

"Who got _your_ eggs and bacon, then?" he retorted.

It was the first sounding of the Personal tone, and behind the cigarette her lips quivered for a fraction of a second.

Then, looking up at him: "Colonel Durrant--a contemporary of my own, as is right and proper."

"A contemporary--why, the man's old enough to be your father!"

"No." They had left the dusky darkness of the trees, and struck off across the lawn. "He could hardly be my father, as he's forty-five and I--thirty!"

Then silence fell, and she knew that he was somewhat tumultuously readjusting his thoughts. If Mrs. Fraser, who was thirty-four, was in love with him, then this woman with the sleepy, farseeing eyes, who was only thirty--what an ass he had been! Just because he had known Bess Fraser ever since he was a kid, and because Lady Harden was a great swell, and wore diamond crowns and things, and had a son at Harrow----

And Lady Harden, apparently dreamily enjoying the exquisite evening, read his thoughts with the greatest ease, and smiled to herself--the vague smile that consisted more of a slight, dimpled lift of her upper lip than of a widening of her mouth.

That evening, by some caprice, she wore no diamonds, and the simplest of her rather sumptuous gowns.

Colonel Durrant, who had fallen deeply in love with her ten years before, and never fallen out, whispered to her that she looked twenty.

And as she smiled in answer, her eyes met Teddy Cleeve's.

* * * * *

Mrs. Fraser, quite unconsciously, gave the great Lady Harden all the information she wanted.

And Lady Harden--her greatness, in several ways, was an undoubted fact, and the proof of this is that only two people in the world suspected it--was insatiable in the matter of information.

Like a boa constrictor, her tremendous curiosity would sleep for months, and then, on awakening, it hungered with a most mighty and most devastating hunger.

And her concentrative force was such that while one person interested her, she lived in a small world, half of which was in blackest shadow, half in brightest light, and in the shadow she stood, watching the only other person who, for the time being, existed.

Bess Fraser, after dinner, told her, quite without knowing it, the whole story of her own rather absurd love for the boy.

She had once been engaged to Dudley Cleeves; she had known Teddy as a little fellow in long sailor trousers and white blouses; he had had the _dearest_ curls--had Lady Harden noticed that the close-cropped hair turned up at the ends even now?

He had been an obstinate child, always good-tempered but always bent on his own way. He was his mother's pet, and was by her always plentifully supplied with money, so that the world was for him a smiling place.

He had insisted on going into the navy--or, rather, he had not insisted; he had simply taken for granted that he was to go, and he had gone.

He had always been in love, but never with one girl for long. "Of course, he's a perfect child," Mrs. Fraser added, with elaborate carelessness.

She herself had been a widow for five years. She was a magnificently beautiful woman, much handsomer than Lady Harden, but she did not know her own points, and wore the wrong colors.

Lady Harden, watching her while she talked, knew how ashamed she was of her love for Teddy Cleeve, and, constitutionally kind and comforting, the younger woman tried to put her at her ease by chiming in with her tone of detached, middle-aged friendliness toward the beautiful youth.

"He is a _dear_ boy," she agreed; "I do like to see him dance! He's so big and strong. Billy, my boy, is going to be big, too, and I only hope he'll turn out like this Teddy!"

And Teddy, attracted, while rather frightened, by the idea of Mrs. Fraser's caring for him, made love to her spasmodically, just to convince himself, and then, convinced by something in her voice, fled to Lady Harden for protection, and was scolded by her.

"You are a wretch," she said, looking up at him. She was a small woman, and in this day of giantesses this has its charm.

"A wretch?"

"Yes. You are a flirt."

Of course, he was delighted by this accusation, and smiled down, his teeth gleaming under his young, yellow mustache.

"I am a saint," he declared, with conviction. "A young, innocent--anchorite."

"Young--yes. You are _very_ young, Mr. Cleeve."

"You called me Teddy this afternoon."

"Then I was a very abandoned person."

"Please be abandoned again. By the way, the colonel expiated many times at dinner, didn't he?"

She stared. "How?"

"By sitting where he did. Not even opposite side of the table! My luck, even, was better."

"Your luck? How?"

"Because--I could at least _see_ you!"

Lady Harden was an adept in the gentle art of snubbing.

"My dear child," she said, very gently, pulling off her gloves, "_don't_ be absurd. I can't bear being made love to by boys!"

"I haven't the slightest intention----" he began, fiercely, but she had turned, and, opening her violin case, took out what she always called her fiddle.

She was not a musical artist--so few people are--but she had worked hard, and knew the things she played.

If there was no Heaven-shaking inspiration about her, there was no flatting, no slipping from note to note. She played simple, little-known things, plaintive for the most part, and played them well.

She also looked her best with fiddle in her arms, a rapt, far-off expression in her half-closed eyes.

Teddy Cleeve, watching her, hated her for the moment.

And, while he had, in a youthful way, loved several women, this was the first one he had hated.

He was, however, too young to see the signification of this fact, and as soon as she had ceased playing, escaped to the smoking room with a major of hussars, who declared that fiddling was the one thing he couldn't stand.

"Lovely creature, Lady Harden," the unmusical major began, as he lit his cigar.

"Too thin," returned Teddy, the crafty.

The major stared. "Are you drunk?" he asked, severely. "Her figger's the best in England! And amusin'. Tells the best stories of any woman I know. Only thing I don't like about her is that infernal fiddlin'."

But the fiddling continued, and Teddy, who loved it, felt his hatred melt. After a bit he went back to the drawing room, only to see the violin being returned to its case. Lady Harden smiled absently at him, and soon afterward was settled at a bridge table, opposite Colonel Durrant.

* * * * *

The next morning Lady Harden went for a ride with a man who had just arrived--a fellow named Broughton. Cleeve watched them go. Then, finding Bess Fraser at his elbow, he asked her to play "fives" with him.

Bess had become non-interesting since Lady Harden's revelation. Poor old Bess--he wondered whether she really---- And to think of Cornwall's wanting to marry her! She really was a splendid creature. Much better looking than Lady Harden. Lady Harden was too pale by daylight.

"I say, Bess, what is Lady Harden's first name?"

"Dagny. Her mother's mother was a Norwegian, you know."

"Dagny," repeated Cleeve, slowly. "I never heard the name before. I like it; it suits her, somehow."

Alas for poor Mrs. Fraser, she was not clever.

Pausing in the game, she looked up.

"Mind you don't fall in love with her, Teddy," she said, sharply.

"What rot!" he answered, smashing the ball into a pocket. "Why should I fall in love with her?"

"Well, a good many men do. And she's frightfully attractive, and you're so--young."

He frowned. "I'm twenty-five, and--a fellow sees a lot by that time--if he's ever going to see anything. Play."

When Lady Harden came in from her ride, she found Teddy waiting for her.

"I've been warned against you," he said, abruptly, his blue eyes dancing.

"Against me?"

"Yes. Against falling in love with you."

The personal note was strong now. Lady Harden sank into a chair with a laugh.

"How perfect! Who warned you? _Dear_ old Lady Carey? Did you tell her a man may not fall in love with his great-aunt?"

"I'm even not sure that yesterday I was not in love with some one who is five years older than you."

Her charming face, flushed with exercise, grew suddenly serious. "Oh! but that was--different."

"I don't see why."

"Why, because she is married."

Cleeve burst out laughing. "I may be an infant," he said, "but I'm not such an infant as to think that 'married or not married' has anything to do with the question."

She laughed, too. "You are a charming infant, at all events. Perhaps if you were a little older----"

"Well?"

"I might allow you to--do what you were warned against."

"Allow me?"

She rose, and went slowly to the foot of the stairs. Then she gathered up her habit and turned.

"Yes, allow you to."

"You grant a great deal by that remark. How about the old 'I had no idea of such a thing?'" he retorted.

She looked at him meditatively. "You know more than I had thought. How old are you?"

"Nearly twenty-six," he answered, stretching a point. "Why?"

"Because my boy is only eleven. I am so curious as to how he will turn out. He is blond, too. Well, _au 'voir_. I must go and dress."

* * * * *

If anyone had asked Dagny Harden, at that period, just what she wanted of young Cleeve, she would not have known what to answer.

She was a great flirt, but, at the same time, she was a very kind woman, and never willfully gave pain to anyone.

A careful study of the science of flirting and its masters and mistresses would probably prove that the greatest--in the sense of artistic skill--flirts are those people who have excitable brains and little imagination.

Dagny Harden had been fond of him in a mild, domestic, sincere way that satisfied both him and herself, and that had never faltered.

She had, however, a really remarkable dramatic talent, and this needing outlet, she interested herself with a series of gracefully conducted, scandal-avoiding flirtations, in which she appeared to each man as a very good woman, found by him personally to be more charming than she intended.

These men, some of them, suffered intensely during their term, but they had no bitterness for her.

And she, liking them all--for she was discriminating, and never let herself in for an affair with a dull man--had really no appreciation of their suffering.

When she had turned a victim's mind and heart wrong side out; when she had watched the wheels go round; when all had been said that could be said without her nice scales of judgment being weighed down on the side of either too great severity or too great indulgence, it was good-by.

She was exquisitely ruthless, brutally enchanting, admirably cruel.

And she never talked of her victims to each other or to other women. She was, in a way, great.

* * * * *

"I wish," said Teddy Cleeve, folding his arms as he sat on the low stone wall, and looking at her, "that I was clever."

"Aren't you clever?"

"No."

"And if you were?"

"If I were, I'd know what you are thinking about."

This, too, is a milestone on the Dover Road.

"What I am thinking about? Well, at that moment I was thinking about you."

"Honor bright?"

"Honor bright. I was wondering what you will be like in fifteen years."

"Why fifteen?"

She smiled, and prodded with her stick at a bit of moss in a crack in the wall. Somewhere below them there was a view, but it was far away.

"Well, because if you were forty you would be just my age."

"You are thirty."

"_Voila!_ That's exactly what I said. A woman of thirty is as old as a man of forty. As it is, you are a child, and I a middle-aged person."

Cleeve watched her for a moment. Then he said, slowly: "I'd give up those intervening years to be forty today."

"Then you'd be an awful idiot!"

"I'd not be an idiot at all. You treat me like a child."

"You are one--to me."

"I'm not a child."

"Very well--you are old. You are a padded veteran of sixty--like Mr. Blake. Do you like that better?"

He was silent, and after a pause they started slowly down the hill.

Two days passed since she had told him that Mrs. Fraser was in love with him. They had been much together, but never alone until now, and she knew that he was furious with himself for letting the minutes slip unmarked by. Suddenly he burst out: "Will you wear that gray frock you wore the first night, to-night? And the low diamond thing in your hair?"

"Why?"

"Because--I want to see you again as I saw you then. I--I have lost my bearings. I can't remember how you looked, and I--want----"

"I looked like a well-preserved, middle-aged lady. Please don't begin to think me young, Teddy."

Under her broad hat brim her eyes gleamed maliciously.

"You _are_ young! I was an idiotic----"

She raised her head.

"Oh, don't! Don't fall in love with me; it would bore us both to death; be my nice adopted son."

"Dear Lady Harden," he returned, flushing, "I assure you that I have not the slightest idea of falling in love with you."

"Thank Heaven! I adore boys, but a boy in love is really _too_ appalling."

He caught her hand and looked down at her, something suddenly dominating in his eyes.

"That is nonsense," he said, shortly. "I am young, but I am not a child, and if I fell in love with you----"

"Well?"

"It would not be as a child loves. That is all."

He released her hand, and they walked on in silence.

* * * * *

The extraordinary delight that most charming women take in playing with fire had ever been Dagny Harden's, for the reason that she had never, in all her experiences, been in the slightest danger of burning her delicate fingers. Purely cerebral flirt that she was, her unawakened heart dozed placidly in the shadow of her husband's strong affection for her.

Once or twice when the suffering she inflicted was plainly written on the face of her victim, her mind shrank fastidiously away from closer examination of pain she had caused, and the disappearance of the man was a relief to her.

As she descended the stairs that evening, in the gray frock and the diamond circlet, she smiled the little smile that meant pleased anticipation.

Teddy was a dear boy, and he had grown older in the last day or two. After dinner she would play on her fiddle and--watch the dear boy. Then there would be a rather picturesque good-by, for he was leaving at dawn, and--that would be all.

Fate, grinning in his monk's sleeve, had settled things otherwise.

There was no music, and at half-past ten Lady Harden found herself in a little boat on the lake, one of several parties, alone with Teddy Cleeve. In the shadow of some willows he pulled in his oars.

His face was very white, his mouth fixed.

"Why have you done this?" he asked, abruptly.

She hesitated, and then, the obvious banality refusing to be uttered, answered, slowly: "It isn't really done, Teddy, you only think it is."

"That is--a damned lie."

The woman never lived who did not enjoy being sworn at by the right man, in the right way.

"Teddy!"

"Oh, yes, 'Teddy'! It _is_ a lie. Why tell it?"

"I mean that--if it hadn't been me it would have been--some one else. Your time had come," she returned, nervously.

From across the lake came singing--some "coon song" anglicized into quaint incomprehensibility. Cleeve folded his arms.

"Don't--look like that, Teddy."

"I look as I feel. I am not--you."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that you looked at me at dinner as if----"

"Hush! Don't say horrid things."

"You looked at me as though you loved me. And if truth is better than lying, it was worse to look like that--without feeling it, than it would have been to really feel it."

"You are talking nonsense. I am very nearsighted, and----"

He laughed harshly. "Can't you play the game even for five minutes? I understood that it amused you to make a fool of me, but it didn't end with that. You have made me really love you. Really love you, do you understand?"

As he spoke, they heard peals of distant laughter, and saw six or seven of the people who had been boating scampering across the moonlit lawn toward the nearest park gates.

"They must be going over to the Westerleighs'--we must go, too," said Lady Harden. "Will you row in?"

Cleeve did not answer; he did not appear to have heard her remark.

After a pause he said, slowly: "You have made me really love you. I don't know why you did it, for I surely had not hurt you in any way. However, you did it, and you must have had some reason. You found me a boy; you have made me a man. Well--you must love me, too."

The boat had begun to drift, and was alone on the burnished water.

Lady Harden clasped her hands nervously.

"I must love you! What _rot_! Come, row to the landing, please. I am going back to the house, and you must go on to the Westerleighs'."

"Dagny--I say, you must love me, too."

"You are crazy."

"I am not."

"Well, I do not love you, and I never shall. Now let us end this melodrama."

Cleeve took up the oars and rowed rapidly to the landing place. Then, as she stepped onto the platform, he took her into his arms.

"You _must_," he said, looking down at her. "It's all your own fault. You did it willfully. Now you must love me."

His dogged persistency puzzled her and routed all her usual array of graceful phrases.

"Am I being invited to--elope with you?" she asked, laughing a little shrilly.

He flushed. "No. I--love you. But--you must feel something of this that is hurting me. Hurting? Why, it's _hell_."

"Hell! I am sorry--indeed I am----"

"Oh, _that_ does no good. Words can't help. You have got to suffer, too," he returned, still holding her round the shoulders.

It was, in spite of the thrill of the unusual that she distinctly felt, absurd. It ought to be laughed at. So she laughed.

"How can you make me suffer, you baby?" she asked.

"Well, I can. Woman have their weapons, and men have theirs. You've made a man of me. I know a lot of things I didn't know last week. Among others, I know that you couldn't have been as you have been unless I had attracted you pretty strongly. You are"--he went on, with the green coolness that sat so oddly on his tense young face--"pretty near to loving me at this moment."

"That is not true."

"Oh, yes, it is, Lady Harden. It's because I am young, and big, and--good looking. These things count for you as well as for us. And you are thirty. I read a book the other day about a woman of thirty. Thirty is young enough, but thirty-five isn't, and--thirty-five is coming."

Her eyes closed for an instant. "You are brutal."

"Yes, I am very brutal. You were brutal, too. You see, I remembered that novel while I was dressing for dinner, and it taught me a lot. You and _it_ have made me rather wise between you. Well, I love you," he went on, suddenly fierce, "and you must love me. _Dagny!_"

Bending, he kissed her.

She herself had killed his boyish shyness, his youthful hesitation, all the boy's natural fear of repulsion.

He was the man, she the woman. He dominated, she submitted; he was strong, she was weak; he was big, she was small.

"Oh, why----" she stammered, as he released her.

"Because--it is the only way. You could always have beaten me at talking----"

"You had no right to kiss me."

"I think I had. If a woman has a right to torment a man as you tormented me, he surely has a right to take whatever means he can of--getting even. Women are so brutal----"

He had found, she felt, the solution to the Eternal riddle.

Her heart was beating furiously, but her voice, as she went on, was cool enough.

"Look here, Teddy, I will tell you the truth about all this. Will you believe me?"

After a second's hesitation he answered, curtly: "Yes."

"Well--you are right. I mean your--method is right. It never occurred to me before that--well, that turn about is fair play. Women are brutes--particularly, perhaps, the good ones who flirt."

Cleeve laughed. "'The good ones who flirt.' Go on!"

"And I suppose you were, in a way, entitled to use against me the only weapons you had. You see, I am quite frank. Only--you used them too soon. I don't love you. Probably, if we had been together a week longer, I should have, but--I do _not_ love you at this minute."

"Wait till I'm gone," he observed, with his horrible young wisdom.

She frowned. "That has nothing to do with it. You leave here to-morrow morning, and on Friday you sail. And I do not love you. I am sorry for having hurt you. Believe this."

"I don't believe it. I'm not sorry, and I don't believe you are. Listen--the others are coming. Run back to the house, and I'll go and meet them. And first--let me kiss you again."

The voices, still afar seemed discordant in the white stillness.

Cleeve opened his arms. "Come. Then I shall believe you." Lady Harden took a step forward, and held her face bravely to his.

Then, just as he bent his head, she turned and hid her face on his arm. "I cannot," she whispered.

The Boy-Man's lips were set hard, his brows drawn down.

"Ah, Dagny, dearest," he whispered, "and I must go to-morrow."

She looked up. "You have won; I have lost; thank God you go to-morrow!" she answered.

A moment later she was speeding through the shadows toward the house, and Cleeve, lighting a cigarette, lounged down to the drive toward the laughing groups of returning frolickers.

A PRESENT-DAY CREED

What matters down here in the darkness? 'Tis only the rat that squeals, Crushed down under the iron hoof. 'Tis only the fool that feels.

'Tis only the child that weeps and sorrows For the death of a love or a rose; While grim in its grinding, soulless mask, Iron, the iron world goes.

God is an artist, mind is the all, Only the art survives. Just for a curve, a tint, a fancy, Millions on millions of lives!

If this be your creed, O late-world poet, Pass, with your puerile pose; For I am the fool, the child that suffers, That weeps and sleeps with the rose.

W. WILFRED CAMPBELL.

BETWEEN THE LINES

By M. H. VORSE

DRAMATIS PERSONAE--MISS PAYSLEY, _twenty-one, small, with a dignified carriage, when she remembers it, otherwise she is as impulsive as a little girl. She is pale, blond, blushes easily and has a way of looking at one with a straight, honest, gaze._

MR. JARVIS, _thirty, tall, well built. Has an easy-going, tolerant manner that is sometimes almost indifferent._

SCENE--_A lamplit piazza. The subdued light throws curious shadows on the thick growth of vines which screen the place from the street. Here and there where the vines are broken one may look out into the velvety blackness of the night. The piazza is furnished in the usual way. Rugs, wicker chairs, wicker tables. On the table a carafe with liquor and glasses. Litter of books, smoking things, etc._

_Enter_ MISS PAYSLEY _and_ MR. JARVIS.

MISS PAYSLEY (_pulling aside the vines_)--What a sense of space darkness gives one! I feel as if I were looking into eternity!

MR. JARVIS (_aside_)---That sounds like Millicent. (_Aloud._) Aren't you going to keep your promise?

MISS PAYSLEY--Don't you feel the greatness of space around you in a night like this?

Mr. Jarvis (_reproachfully_)--And I thought you were a woman of your word. I didn't bring you out here to look into limitless space. I brought you out here to look into my hand.

MISS PAYSLEY (_bringing her eyes to his, as if with effort, and blushing_)--You know I warned you! I'm awfully in earnest, and sometimes I say--well, things.

MR. JARVIS--I want the truth, you know. (_Shakes up the pillow in the hammock._)

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--He brought me out here to get me to hold his hand half an hour! None in mine, thanks! I'll show him! (_Aloud._) No, here, please, _quite_ under the light.

MR. JARVIS--You'll be ever so much more comfortable in the hammock.

MISS PAYSLEY (_with a malicious smile_)--You're so thoughtful! But light I _must_ have. Now the table. (_Moves the table between them._) Please let both your hands lie quite naturally on it.

MR. JARVIS (_disappointed_)--On the table? Oh! (_Aside._) At this rate palmistry won't be popular any more.

MISS PAYSLEY (_bends over his hand, then raises her eyes suddenly to Jarvis_)--You know it makes me almost nervous to read your hand. I feel, with some people, as if I were listening at the door and hearing secrets I oughtn't to. (_Aside._) I wouldn't do it for any one but Millicent. But I can't stand by and see that Orton woman---- How I hate engaged flirts!

MR. JARVIS--I'm not afraid; if I had been, why should I have asked you?

MISS PAYSLEY (_raising her eyes suddenly again_)--You may have had--your reasons.

MR. JARVIS (_aside_)--That's a fetching way she has of raising her eyes. Wonder what she meant by that just now. (_Aloud._) How becoming the pale green of the leaves is to your hair.

MISS PAYSLEY--Turn your hands over, please. Now put your right one directly under the light. Oh!

MR. JARVIS--What do you see?

MISS PAYSLEY--What _strange, strange nails_. I've read about it, but I've never seen it before. Not so marked! It's the perfect type!

MR. JARVIS (_interested in spite of himself_)--What does it mean?

MISS PAYSLEY (_embarrassed, hesitating_)--It isn't pleasant.

MR. JARVIS (_looking at her_)--Go on!

MISS PAYSLEY (_reluctantly_)--Well, they mean--consumption! (_Aside._) They'll make him serious--besides, it _is_ the type.

MR. JARVIS (_rising to the bait_)--Why, I haven't a consumptive relative. (_Aside._) She is honest. And I was expecting the old Girdle of Venus gag. (_Aloud._) What does this line mean, and why are the veins of my hands so red?

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--You don't catch this child this way. No compliments about your impressible temperaments from me. (_Aloud, meditatingly, slowly._) Those red lines--sometimes--they mean insanity--but in your case----

MR. JARVIS (_with sarcasm_)--Would you mind telling me at what age I am going to lose my teeth, or if I am in danger of breaking a leg? I had no idea palmistry was so pathological.

MISS PAYSLEY (_undisturbed_)--Hold your fingers up to the light.

MR. JARVIS (_aside_)--Now for the old "you let money slip through your fingers."

MISS PAYSLEY--You don't know how to hold on to your fortune; you let the best thing in your life slip through your fingers.

MR. JARVIS (_aside_)--Rather a good variant. (_Aloud._) What do you mean?

MISS PAYSLEY (_with impatience_)--How should I know what I mean? I'm telling you what I see. I don't know enough about you to have the answer to the riddle of your hand. Remember, we've only met twice.

MR. JARVIS--Three times.

MISS PAYSLEY--Twice, three times, half a dozen--it doesn't signify.

MR. JARVIS--It does to me.

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--I'm sorry for you, Millicent. (_Aloud._) You ought to know what I mean. Have you never been in danger of losing through your own carelessness--I mean, something you are fond of? (_Aside._) That's pretty pointed. I hope Millicent won't give me away.

MR. JARVIS--Have you ever heard about the expulsive power of a new--interest.

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--The pill. (_With reflection._) I've heard of changing one's mind.

MR. JARVIS (_holding up his hand, which is large and powerful_)--And my hand shows indecision of character?

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--He's jesting. They're all alike--men. Keen for praise. (_Aloud._) I didn't say indecisive. You know what you want, but you often don't value what you have. You are ready to pay for a thing of lesser value with the one of greater.

MR. JARVIS--So few things have a fixed value; it's what they seem worth to you. You can only measure the worth of any given thing by the pleasure it gives you.

MISS PAYSLEY--The selfish man's creed. (_Glancing at his hand._) You are abominably selfish, you know--selfish and self-indulgent! You will sacrifice anything to attain something you want, except your own comfort!

MR. JARVIS (_with a fine air of impartiality_)--I don't think that's altogether true.

MISS PAYSLEY (_studying his hand intently_)--Yes, and you will sacrifice not only anything but anybody!

MR. JARVIS (_modestly_)--That is what has always endeared me so to my friends. I'm a sort of modern Moloch!

MISS PAYSLEY (_raising her eyes suddenly_)--Don't joke about it. It may be true. (_There is a strained eagerness in her manner that is quite convincing._)

MR. JARVIS (_aside_)--Hanged if I don't think she believes this rot.

MISS PAYSLEY--Please hold up your hands with the first fingers touching. I thought so.

MR. JARVIS--What?

MISS PAYSLEY (_with conviction_)--Your best impulses you never follow to the end, either in your life or your work. For instance, I imagine your studio is full of half-finished canvases, the best work you have done, but unfinished. The work you expose, your finished stuff, is what has let itself be finished easily!

MR. JARVIS (_suspiciously_)--You guessed that from such of my work as you've seen.

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--That was a dead steal from Millicent! (_Aloud, coolly._) I haven't the pleasure of knowing much of your work, Mr. Jarvis. Please put your right hand under the light. (_Aside._) I'd better put him in good temper again. Queer how a man loves a chance of talking uninterruptedly about himself. (_Aloud._) You have an exaggerated worship of strength in yourself and others.

MR. JARVIS--Where do you see that?

MISS PAYSLEY--In the whole character of your hand. (_Aside._) Millicent said "strength and the admiration of strength is his keynote." (_Aloud._) You must see for yourself that your hand isn't a weak one, and see how the lines are cut--as if with a chisel. (_Aside._) He's purring already like a Cheshire cat.

MR. JARVIS--What do you mean by an exaggerated worship of strength?

MISS PAYSLEY--I mean you underscore strength too much among the other virtues.

MR. JARVIS--Can one? A man, I mean?

MISS PAYSLEY--And with that as the foundation of your character, it's astonishing what weak-minded things you do!

MR. JARVIS--How graceful!

MISS PAYSLEY--What else do you call all those unfinished canvases? The line of least resistance isn't strength.

MR. JARVIS (_with pathos_)--One would think I were your Sunday-school class.

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--It's time to give him more toffey. (_Aloud._) Your popularity has been one of the reasons of your not always following your creed of strength.

MR. JARVIS (_modestly_)--Yes, my fatal beauty has always stood in the way of my living up to my ideals!

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--Oh, you may sneer, but you know you like it. Else you wouldn't be here. (_Aloud._) There is something here I don't understand.

MR. JARVIS (_aside_)--I was waiting for that to come. (_Aloud._) Go on!

MISS PAYSLEY--Please let your hand drop over from the wrist. How unusual!

MR. JARVIS (_interested_)--I've never seen that done before.

MISS PAYSLEY (_tranquilly_)--You have your fortune told early and often?

MR. JARVIS (_undisturbed_)--As often as possible!

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--Of course you never lose a chance of talking about yourself! (_Aloud._) You've a very unusual hand. You're two or three people, one at the top of the other.

MR. JARVIS (_plaintively_)--One would think I were a ham sandwich.

MISS PAYSLEY (_calmly_)--A layer cake, I should put it.

MR. JARVIS (_aside_)--You can't feaze her. She's really prettier than Mrs. Orton. (_Aloud._) What are my many characters? It's interesting. (_Aside._) Now for the "You know the higher but follow the lower."

MISS PAYSLEY--Fundamentally, beside your love of strength, you are simple, kindly, unaffected. You would be happy married to a girl kindly and unaffected like yourself. (_Aside._) I mustn't give too pointed a description of Millicent.

MR. JARVIS--The country---- Milking time? Love in a cottage? Baby's first step?

MISS PAYSLEY--Laugh, if you like, but that's really what you like, and what would make you happy! That's the sort of atmosphere you do your best work in. You need for a wife some one not too self-assertive, and who believes in you. You need a certain sort of appreciation to work well--and wanting appreciation, you put up with flattery.

MR. JARVIS--I just live on flattery.

MISS PAYSLEY (_with conviction_)--You drink it in by the pailful! You don't mind if it's put on with a butter knife!

MR. JARVIS (_who has gotten more and more interested_)--What becomes of my strength then?

MISS PAYSLEY--Oh, you only live on flattery when you are starved for legitimate appreciation. (_Aside._) I think I got out of that rather neatly. (_Aloud._) You are really idealistic, with a good deal of sentiment, and, selfish as you are, you have a heart.

MR. JARVIS (_gratefully_)--Thank you for the heart.

MISS PAYSLEY--You like to have people think you are cynical and light-minded. You only show your real self to a few people.

MR. JARVIS--He sounds to me like a prig and a bore.

MISS PAYSLEY (_with more warmth than she has shown yet_)--He's a charming and delightful person. It's the man of the world with the-smile-that-won't-come-off that's the bore!

MR. JARVIS--Have you found me so?

MISS PAYSLEY (_steadily_)--Not when I've read between the lines.

MR. JARVIS (_looking at Miss Paysley searchingly_)---I really think you're honest.

MISS PAYSLEY (_returning his look_)--What did you think I came out here for?

MR. JARVIS (_still looking into Miss Paysley's eyes_)--Apparently to give me your unvarnished opinion of me. Please go on.

MISS PAYSLEY--I've described the first and second layers of the cake.

MR. JARVIS--Isn't there any frosting?

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--They simply are insatiable for praise. (_Aloud._) The frosting doesn't count. I've been eating the frosting ever since I met you.

MR. JARVIS (_meekly_)--I hope you liked it.

MISS PAYSLEY (_harking back to the last remark but one_)--This superimposed you has different tastes, likes different women--and is more easily taken in.

MR. JARVIS--How more easily taken in?

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--I thought I'd get a rise. Now for the plunge. (_Aloud._) I mean that in your own world, among the people who think as you do, you can tell the real ones from those who are only shams.

MR. JARVIS (_quickly_)--Whereas, in the world represented by what we have agreed to call the upper layer of the cake, I don't know a lump of flour from a raisin?

MISS PAYSLEY--Exactly.

MR. JARVIS--May I ask if you are a real raisin--as I've given you the credit of being?

MISS PAYSLEY--Oh! you should know what I am. I don't belong to the upper layer--the highly spiced one.

MR. JARVIS--Would you mind telling me if there is any particular lump of flour now passing itself off on me as a raisin?

MISS PAYSLEY (_with dignity_)--My good man, this is palmistry, not a life saving expedition! (_Aside._) He's a little too quick.

MR. JARVIS--It seemed to me to have something to do with the art of portrait painting.

MISS PAYSLEY--I'm not responsible, am I, for the lines in your hand?

MR. JARVIS--No, nor for your opinion of me.

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--You can't get a rise out of me that way. (_Aloud._) No, nor for that, either.

MR. JARVIS--Let's sift down the evidence. I'm in danger of losing something that is precious to me, or, rather, I'm in danger of paying with my gold piece for a brazen image. I don't follow my best impulses to the end. I'm a layer cake with a substantial piece of home-made cake for my under layer and an inferior article on top. Miss Paysley, would you kindly tell me if this cross in my left hand is a warning to avoid widows with pale, gold hair?

MISS PAYSLEY--I wish you would tell me if you came out here with the honest intention of having your fortune told?

MR. JARVIS (_aside._)--She can give Mrs. Orton cards and spades. (_Aloud._) Did you come out here with the intention of telling my fortune?

MISS PAYSLEY (_slowly_)--I've done what I came out for!

MR. JARVIS--And that was?

MISS PAYSLEY (_rising and turning away_)--Something I foolishly thought I ought to do.

MR. JARVIS--Foolishly? I think it was too lovely of you to take any interest in my affairs at all.

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--I've never seen anyone so insupportable, and he looks--nice! (_Aloud, with wide-open eyes._) _Your_ affairs! You don't suppose it's for _you?_

MR. JARVIS--Eh?

MISS PAYSLEY--I suppose you think that there is no such thing as real loyalty or friendship between girls?

MR. JARVIS--Oh! (_They both are silent a moment, each measuring the other._)

MR. JARVIS (_steadily_)--Have you happened to hear of Millicent Holt's engagement?

MISS PAYSLEY (_throwing down her hand_)--You oughtn't to ask her best friend that!

MR. JARVIS (_calmly_)--To Bob Burke, I mean.

MISS PAYSLEY (_entirely taken aback_)--To Bob Burke! She never did! Not Millicent! I could have sworn to Millicent!

MR. JARVIS (_still calmly_)--So could I. So I did.

MISS PAYSLEY (_with horror-struck eyes_)--But I don't understand!

MR. JARVIS--I didn't, at first, either. It seems Bobby Burke's soul and hers are twins, or something of that kind. So where do I come in?

MISS PAYSLEY--But when we were abroad together----

MR. JARVIS--Please don't! I know I take a "lump of dough for a raisin," but----

MISS PAYSLEY (_impulsively_)--Please forgive me. I thought----

MR. JARVIS--That I was "doing your friend dirt," for the sake of a brazen image.

MISS PAYSLEY (_bravely_)--What else was I to think?

MR. JARVIS (_gravely_)--And for the sake of your friend you told me what you thought of me. (_Aside._) I believe you at least do tell the truth.

MISS PAYSLEY (_impulsively_)--I didn't tell you _all_ the truth. I only told you the horrid part.

MR. JARVIS--And why wouldn't you tell me the rest?

MISS PAYSLEY (_in a humble little voice_)--Because I was fool enough to think you were spoiled enough already! (_Aside._) How could Millicent--Bobby Burke--that purple ass. Think of throwing _him_ over for Bobby Burke!

MR. JARVIS (_aside_)--How pretty she is. (_Aloud._) Life hasn't exactly spoiled me lately. (_Aside._) And I've been wasting time on Mrs. Orton.

MISS PAYSLEY (_impulsively_)--And now if I had your hand to tell over again, I would tell you all--the other things first.

MR. JARVIS--It's not too late.

MISS PAYSLEY--And I wasn't honest about another thing. We've met four times--I remember them all. (_Aside._) I've been a beast to him. Mrs. Orton shan't have him to hurt. And Millicent---- All women are cats!

MR. JARVIS--So do I. The first time you were nice to me, and the second time you were nice----

MISS PAYSLEY--Because of Millicent.

MR. JARVIS--And the third time--you snubbed me. I suppose that was because of Millicent, too.

MISS PAYSLEY (_aside_)--It was because of Mrs. Orton. (_Aloud, with conviction and blushing._) And to-night I've been--simply horrid.

MR. JARVIS--To-night you've told me more of my fortune than you've any idea. (_Aside._) She's adorable when she blushes!

MISS PAYSLEY (_still red_)--I've been an impertinent, meddling thing!

MR. JARVIS--You've taught me a great deal. I'm going to follow my good impulses to the end--beginning now. So please look quickly in your own hand and tell me if a man with a character like a layer cake has a great influence on your life?

MISS PAYSLEY--I told you you followed the line of least resistance.

THE BABY'S CURLS

By MARGARET HOUSTON

A little skein of tangled floss they lie, (You always said they should have been a girl's.) The tears will come--you cannot quite tell why-- They fall unheeded on that mass--his curls. Poor little silken skein, so dear to you. "'Twere better short," the wiser father said, "He's getting older now."--Alas, how true! And yet you wonder where the years have fled.

"'Twere better short----" the while your fond heart yearned To keep them still, reluctant standing by, You saw your little angel, earthward turned, Yet all unknowing, lay his halo by. Soft little threads! They held you with such strength! You knew the way each wanton ringlet fell, You knew each shining tendril's golden length, How oft they've tangled, only you can tell.

In dusky twilight shadows, oh, how oft You've seen their light along your shoulder lie. You leaned your cheek to touch the masses soft, The while you crooned some drowsy lullaby. How often when the sun was dawning red You bent above him in the early ray, And from that glory round the baby head You drew your light for all the weary day.

And now--you start--the front door gives a slam-- The hall resounds with little, hurrying feet, He climbs upon your knee--the wee, shorn lamb,-- And dries your tears with kisses, warm and sweet. You fold your sorrow from his happy eyes-- (You always said they should have been a girl's.) Half of his Eden sunlight buried lies Amid the meshes of those baby curls.

BROWN BETTY

By GRACE S. RICHMOND

"It's all right, Joe," said Miss Farnsworth, rapidly drawing on a pair of heavy white gloves. "You needn't be in the least afraid to trust me with the colts. And the station agent can find somebody to help him load the wagon for me."

She sprang in and took her seat at the front of the big farm wagon--a most unusual and dainty figure there, in her crisp white linen. She gathered the reins deftly, said gayly to the people on the farmhouse porch: "When I come back I'll show you unpatriotic persons how to keep Fourth of July in the country," and would have driven off with a flourish but for one unforeseen and effective hindrance. Joe remained stolidly at the heads of the two restless black colts.

"You may give them their heads now, Joe," said the girl, decisively.

"In jest a minute, miss."

"Now. I'm in a hurry."

But Joe remained stationary. He turned his head and eyed uneasily a window above the porch, murmuring: "Jest a minute, now----"

Miss Farnsworth waited half the designated period, then she said, imperatively: "Joe, be so kind as to let go of those horses."

Joe pretended to have found something wrong with the bridle of the off horse. Miss Farnsworth watched him skeptically. And an instant later Stuart Jarvis appeared upon the porch, hat in hand, smiling at the driver of the farm wagon.

"May I go with you?" he asked, easily, coming up.

There was no reason why she should refuse, particularly with three middle-aged women, two elderly gentlemen, and four girls observing with interest from the porch. Neither was there good reason for refusing to allow Mr. Jarvis to take the reins, since he leaped up at the right side of the wagon, and held out his hand for them as a matter of course. But the moment they were around the first bend in the road Agnes Farnsworth attempted to adjust affairs to her original intentions.

"Would you mind letting me drive?" she asked. The words, though spoken with a silver tongue, had rather the effect of a notification than of an interrogation.

"Not in the least," returned Jarvis, making no motion, however, to resign the reins, "provided you can prove that I am authorized to give up my charge."

She looked at him as if she doubted whether she had heard aright. "You know perfectly well that I am accustomed to horses," she declared, moving as if she intended to change places with him.

He looked full down at her, smiling, but he still drove with the air of one who intends to continue in his present occupation. The black colts were going at a spanking trot, making nothing of the decided upward trend of the road. Their shining coats gleamed in the sun; alertness and power showed in every line of them. They were alive from the tips of their forward-pointing satin ears to the ends of their handsome uncropped tails, and they felt their life quiveringly.

"There is no reason in the world why I shouldn't drive," said Miss Farnsworth, with the pleasantly determined air of a girl who intends ultimately to have her own way. "If you had not appeared just at the moment you did, I should have come alone."

"Do you really think you would?" asked Jarvis, studying the left ear of the nigh horse.

"Certainly. Why not?"

"Because I told Joe not to let you go without me."

She colored under her summer's tan.

"May I ask," she inquired, somewhat stiffly, "why you didn't suggest to me an hour ago that you wished to get to the station?"

Jarvis smiled at this way of putting it. "Joe was intending to go with you," he explained.

She looked puzzled.

"Five minutes before you left, Joe came and told me that an accident had happened to one of his men, and that he couldn't go. He said he didn't think the colts were safe for you. I've been here only three days--I don't know anything about them. Joe does."

"Oh--nonsense!" said the girl. "I'm not afraid of them."

"They ran away day before yesterday."

"That makes no difference."

"They are crazily afraid of everything in the shape of a conveyance run by its own motive power, from a threshing machine to an automobile."

"That makes no difference, either," declared the young person beside him with energy. "Not the least in the world."

"Possibly not--to you. It makes an immense difference to me."

She looked away, although the words were said in a matter-of-fact tone hardly calculated to convey their full importance.

"Since you are here to take the reins away from me when I scream," she said, with a curling lip, "it is perfect nonsense to refuse to let me drive. Mr. Jarvis----"

"Put it politely," he warned her, smiling.

"Please change places with me." She said it imperiously.

He looked steadfastly down into her eyes for an instant, until her glance fell. Then he asked, lightly:

"Have you driven them before?"

"No."

"I wonder why," he mused.

She was silent, but her cheeks burned with displeasure.

"I'm glad we're to have a Fourth of July celebration," said he, driving steadily on. His tone became casual, with a pleasant inflection, quite as if there had been no controversy. "It will do the natives good--stir them up. I took the liberty, after you had sent your order, of wiring the dealer to add rather a good lot of explosives on my own account. They will come along with yours. It's lucky the wagon is big--we shall need it for all the stuff."

But the girl would not talk about the Fourth of July. She sat erect, with her very charming head in the air, and let the miles roll by in silence.

Upon the platform of the small freight house at the junction stood several boxes, a long roll and two trunks--all due at the farmhouse. As the wagon drew up to it, the freight agent came leisurely out to attend to business. His eyes fell at once upon the black team.

"Pretty likely pair," said he, with an approving pat upon the nearest shining flank. "Joe Hempstead's, ain't they? I heard he set considerable store by 'em. Well, they're all right--or will be, when they're a little older. I've got a mare now that I cal'late could show 'em a clean pair o' heels. She's round behind the station. I'll bring her out."

"Of course--that's what we came to see," observed Jarvis, as the man disappeared. "Getting our load is a secondary matter."

"Other matters are always secondary to the sight of a good horse," retorted his companion. She was leaning forward and Jarvis did not miss the opportunity to look at her. He gazed intently at a certain conjunction of curves at the back of her neck--a spot which always tempted him tremendously whenever he saw it.

The freight agent appeared round the corner of the station, leading an animal the sight of which made Jarvis' eyes light with pleasure. Agnes Farnsworth caught her breath softly and leaned still further forward.

The brown mare was led back and forth before them, the colts requiring a strong hand upon the reins as she caracoled in front of their exasperated eyes. Jarvis was obliged to give them his whole attention. But the girl slipped down from the wagon. She went up to the mare and laid a coaxing, caressing hand upon the velvet nose--a hand so gentle that the animal did not resent it. She spoke softly to her; inquired her name, and called her by it in a voice of music--Betty. Presently she asked for the halter, and the freight agent, somewhat doubtful, but too full of admiration for the near presence of beauty to refuse, gave it to her. Then, indeed, did Miss Farnsworth prove the truth of her assertion that she was accustomed to horses. In five minutes she had made love to the mare so effectively that the shy and hitherto somewhat disdainful creature was following her with a slack halter and an entreating nose. Incidentally Betty had allowed the slender fingers to open her mouth.

"Of course you are not selling her," remarked Miss Farnsworth, carelessly, as she walked away to examine her freight.

"Well--had an offer of two hundred and fifty for her last week."

She looked around with an astonished face. "And wouldn't take it?"

"Why--no. She's wu'th three hundred if she's wu'th a cent."

"You won't get three hundred for her," said the girl.

"She's as sound as a nut," declared the freight agent, with indignation. Miss Farnsworth laughed.

"She's a pretty creature," said she, "but I have eyes. How did she hurt her left hind ankle?"

The freight agent stared. "Her left hind ankle! Why--there ain't a sign of a limp in it. And her knee action's perfect."

"She was lame two weeks ago," said the girl, and looked at him. Jarvis had brought his colts to a temporary stand-still, and was observing the little scene with amusement.

"Why--she got a stone in that left hind foot," admitted the freight agent, walking the mare toward the corner of the building. "Any horse'll do that. She ain't lame now--wa'n't then to amount to anything. But I'd like to know how you guessed it."

She was still laughing. "I suppose you would let her go for two hundred and twenty-five, now, wouldn't you?"

The freight agent led his mare away without deigning to reply, except by a shake of the head. He came back and loaded the freight into the wagon, leaving the trunks till the last. As he was shouldering the first of these, Agnes stopped him.

"Will you take two hundred and fifty for Betty?" she asked, with perfect coolness, except for a certain gleam in her eyes.

"You ain't buyin' horses yourself?"

"I asked you a question."

"She ain't no lady's horse."

"I asked you if you would sell her for two hundred and fifty dollars," repeated the girl, and prepared to step up into the wagon. Jarvis was not getting down to assist her. The black pair were too restless for that.

"Why--I'd ought to have three hundred for her," the man hesitated.

Miss Farnsworth set her foot upon the step and drew herself up beside Jarvis. She did not look toward the freight agent. Just as the horses began to swing about, the man upon the platform said, haltingly:

"Well--if you mean it, and can pay me cash----"

She looked at him once more, quite indifferently. "I s'pose you can have her. But she's wu'th more."

"Mr. Jarvis," said the horse buyer, "can we lead her home?"

He shook his head. "Not behind the colts."

She gave him one glance of scorn--the last of any sort he received from her for some time to come. "Have you a saddle?" she asked of the agent.

"Yes, ma'am. Not a very good one, but such as 'tis."

"Will you ride her home for me?" she asked, over a cool shoulder, of the man beside her.

"Not while you drive the colts," he answered, with a keen glance at her, in which she might have read several things if she had taken the trouble.

"Have you a side-saddle?" she demanded of the freight agent.

"Well--if you'll wait five minutes--I 'low I can get one."

As the man disappeared, Miss Farnsworth jumped down from the wagon once more. She produced a letter, and, from the letter a key. With this she opened one of the trunks, which yet stood upon the platform, lifted a tray, dived among sundry garments, and drew out with an air of triumph something made of dark green cloth and folded carefully. With this she walked away into the empty, country freight house.

When, after two minutes' absence, she emerged again, she was holding up the skirt of a riding habit and carrying a bundle of something which she took to the trunk and hastily stowed away. She said nothing whatever to Jarvis, but stood awaiting the return of the freight agent with an averted cheek.

When the mare reappeared upon the scene she wore an old side-saddle of ancient pattern, and was clumsily bridled with headgear too large for her. Jarvis gave her one glance, and spoke with decision.

"If you will hold these horses a minute, I'll look that affair over," he said.

The other man grinned. "All the same to me," he returned, amicably. "Like enough you're more used to this sort of business than I be."

Jarvis went at the big bridle, rearranging straps, getting out his knife and cutting an extra hole or two, tightening it and bringing it more nearly to fit the sleek, small head of the mare. Miss Farnsworth looked on silently. If she appreciated this care for her safety, she did not make it apparent. Only, as Jarvis finished a very careful examination and testing of the side-saddle and stood erect with a smile at her, she said: "Thank you"--quite as if she had no mind to say it. With which he was obliged to be content.

He silently put her upon the mare, held the animal quiet while he looked for the space of one slow breath gravely up into the girl's face, meeting only lowered lashes and a scornful mouth, and let go the bits. An instant later brown Betty and her rider were twenty rods down the road.

The two men watched her round the turn. Then Jarvis sprang to his place.

"Load the rest of the stuff in--quick," he said, and the other obeyed.

"Gee!" remarked the station agent to himself, watching the cloud of dust in which the wagon was disappearing. "Looks like he'd got left. He can't catch the mare--not with that load. Say, but her and Betty made a picture--that's right."

* * * * *

The road from Crofton Junction to the Hempstead Farms lay, for the most part, down hill. The black pair appreciated this fact. They had been trained in double harness from the beginning, and their ideas of life and its purposes were identical. They now joined forces to take the freight home in the shortest and most impracticable space of time.

Jarvis kept them well in hand. If he had had them in front of a light vehicle of some sort, unencumbered with a miscellaneous and unstowable lot of freight, he would have enjoyed letting them have their will. As it was, he was obliged to consider several conflicting elements in the situation and restrain the colts accordingly. His pace, therefore, was not sufficiently fast to allow him to gain upon the fleet-footed mare and her rider, and the winding road gave him no hint of their whereabouts. He did not belong to the household of boarders at the Hempstead Farms; his presence there just now was a matter of business with one of the elderly gentlemen who were taking their vacation upon the farmhouse porch--that and a certain willingness to attend carefully and unhurriedly to business which had brought him within sight of a certain girl.

It was a bit dull driving back alone. He was not familiar with the road; it was not the one by which he had come. Miss Farnsworth had not planned this outcome of the trip from the beginning--he gave her credit for that; neither could he expect a girl who had fallen in love with, and purchased, a saddle horse within the short space of fifteen minutes, to wait for it to be sent leisurely home. But it occurred to him that she might have been willing to let the mare trot lightly along the road just ahead of the blacks, where Betty's nearness might least disconcert Tim and Tom, and where she might now and then exchange a word with their driver over her shoulder--even that cool shoulder of hers.

All at once he caught sight of the brown mare. As he approached a fork in the road, Miss Farnsworth and Betty came galloping up the east split of the fork--the one which did not lead toward Hempstead Farms. He laughed to himself, for he perceived at once that she had taken the wrong road and was spurring to get back to the fork before he should have passed.

But in this she did not succeed. Jarvis reached the corner before her. He drew up a little to let her in ahead of him, for the road was narrow. But as she neared him she motioned him ahead, and to humor her when he could he went on, though he doubted the wisdom of letting the blacks hear Betty's sharp-ringing little hoofs at their heels.

"How do you like her?" he called, as he passed, managing a shift of the reins and an uplifted hat. He smiled at her quite as if he had nothing in the world against her, though he was feeling at the moment that the brute creation are not the only things which need a certain amount of taming.

"Oh, she's a dear," answered Miss Farnsworth, in a voice as sweet as a flute. "Isn't she the prettiest thing? She's a perfect saddle-horse--except for the tricks I haven't found out yet."

She was smiling back at him, all traces of petulance smoothed quite out of her face. Her cheeks were brilliantly pink, her hair blown by the breeze. She carried her wide-brimmed straw hat on the pommel of her saddle; evidently it had not proved satisfactory as a riding hat. Altogether, in the brief chance he had for observation, Jarvis was of the notion that there might be two opinions as to what creature was the prettiest thing on the Crofton road that day.

There was not much talk possible. There could be no question that Tim and Tom heard Betty coming on behind them, and were exercised thereby. The mare's stride was shorter than that of the colts; her hoofbeats reached them in quicker rhythm than their own. As a small clock ticking beside a big one seems to say to the latter, "Hurry up--hurry up"---so Betty's rapid trot behind stirred up the young pair in front to greater valor.

If Betty's rider, being avowedly an expert horsewoman, recognized this, it did not appear in any pains she took to avoid it. Betty danced behind faster and faster; and faster and faster did the blacks strain to draw away from her.

There came at length a moment when Jarvis could not have boasted that he still had them in hand. About the most that he could do was to keep them in the road and on their feet. Two minutes before Miss Agnes Farnsworth appeared at the fork of the road the driver of the blacks could at any moment have pulled them with a powerful hand back upon their haunches and brought them to a quick-breathing standstill. Two minutes afterward neither he nor any other man could have done it.

And yet Jarvis did not make so much as a turn of the head to suggest to Betty's rider that she call off the race. This, of course, was what he should have done; it was obviously the only common-sense thing to do. Plainly, since he would not do it, there was still one more mettlesome spirit upon the Crofton road to be reckoned with that morning.